evil bits
I’m actually *really* surprised that nobody on Utah Open Source Planet has blogged about the latest story in the Slashdot headlines, about the “naughty bits” decision. It just hit the front page for the second time (once an original post, now as a Backslash article). What is everyone’s take on it? I’m curious.
Now, while I’m too lazy to read court documents (much less understand them), I’m not really going to say much about anything other than where I stand on the principles. I agree with one commentor, that the ruling extends beyond just a ‘Cleanflix’ type business model, and it instead extends into the realm of what copyright owners can do with the content that you legally purchased (licensed, rent-to-own, whatever).
As far as I understand it, this is how the “edited movies” business model works — it removes itself from the crosshair because the movie is already owned by the customer. They just make a copy of that for them and digitally remove some parts for them. That seems perfectly reasonable to me. I’m writing my own DVD ripping script right now which does something slightly different — it doesn’t alter the movie itself, but it does completely ignore the commercials, ads, menus, and almost all the audio tracks. Aren’t I also altering the original copyright holder’s vision of duplication?
Anyway, it comes as no shock to me that evil men have it in their interests to destroy our liberty, and it certainly comes as even less as a surprise that most of Slashdot approves of the ruling because it somehow strikes a blow to morality and Christianity. What they fail to realize, of course, is that all liberty such as civil rights stem from the same root of morality. You can’t defend evil (the right for artists to not let an audience to choose their level of filtering) and good (allow fair use) at the same time.
The whole thing disgusts me, personally.
July 12th, 2006 at 6:25 am
IANAL and I haven’t read the fine article, but from what I could make out it’s definitely a scary ruling. Even if you accept the premise for the existence of copyright, this isn’t far from ABC trying to force you to watch their commercials which is something I’m sure everyone except ABC and their advertisers is opposed to.
I think I’ll blog on why copyright is a Bad Thing (my own opinion). That’s always fun.
The ruling is bad, but we still have an avenue to clean flicks. AFAIK nobody’s going to say you can’t distribute patches for copyrighted material anytime soon. In the mplayer world these are known as EDL files. Home-brew DVRs are getting more common, and most of them run mplayer. Pick up the filmwatch torch and get a community database of stuff to skip, and with any luck some affordable dvd players with support for EDL or something like it won’t be far behind.
One thing: market filmwatch as a db of stuff you don’t want to watch in movies. Make it flexible so that the average /.’er can find something he wants, not just something to bash because it’s moral. IOW, there will be a group of people that want to skip boring dialog or the music in musicals… accomodate them so that they’re on your side and not pointless opponents.
July 12th, 2006 at 8:53 am
“Pick up the filmwatch torch and get a community database of stuff to skip, and with any luck some affordable dvd players with support for EDL or something like it won’t be far behind.”
I’m thinking of resurrecting this project. I’d originally got a copy of mhalcrow’s original source but it lacked DB schemas, so I deviated and created my own schemas and began creating my own source for FilmWatch as a Ruby on Rails project. Unfortunately, it didn’t get very far before I lost steam and time. But lately Von’s been asking about it, and I’ve been itching for another serious non-toy RoR project. With this court decision bringing the need back into the spotlight, that should be sufficient to get some community support going for it again.
Ok, I’ve talked myself into it; let’s do this! I’ll be starting a project and setting up a public SVN repository. Once that’s ready I’ll blog an call for volunteers and we can get this going!