Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Movie piracy? Sanitized films? Action!

By STEVE PERSALL
Published April 29, 2005

	[Photo: AMC]
	The film industry finds itself wrapped up in many legal issues, not the least of which is “intellectual property.” For more insight, tune in to the cable special Bleep: Censoring Hollywood, an AMC documentary airing Sunday at 11:30 a.m.

In these dog days before summer blockbusters, the best drama - and some comic relief - from Hollywood isn't found in theaters, but in courtrooms and legislative chambers where the defense of intellectual property is opening a six-pack of worms.

Last week, Congress sent a bill to President Bush that will make videotaping in theaters a federal offense. The president is expected to sign it into law, believing it also curbs Michael Moore.

Only a bootlegger would disagree with tougher penalties for movie piracy. But the soon-to-be law contains a piggybacked bill sparking a debate of artistic integrity vs. the right to choose how much sex, violence, profanity and drug abuse will be allowed in America's households.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court is pondering a pivotal decision in the movie piracy issue that may also impact technological innovation. The future of geeks huddled in garages building tomorrow hangs in the balance.

In all fairness, these are serious issues. Let's take them one at a time, and try to keep a straight face.

First, the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act that's now on the president's desk for signing. It's an important step in combating movie piracy, since most bootlegged DVDs are thought to be copied from in-theater recording. The Motion Picture Association of America, representing seven major studios, pushed hard for its passage, but made a concession that weakens the concept of intellectual property rights.

The same intellectual property rights the MPAA is trying to protect against piracy.

Attached to the bill is the Family Movie Act, allowing the use of technology to clean up material in DVDs that parents or prudes don't want to see.

Companies such as CleanFlicks (www.cleanflicks.com) offer the most controversial method, buying a studio-approved DVD and digitally editing out potentially offensive material. CleanFlicks copies the sanitized version, then rents them online and sells them to video stores. Currently more than 700 edited movies are available, including such grisly R-rated offerings as Saw, Dawn of the Dead and the Kill Bill films, which altogether might be good for an hour of family TV time.

How that process differs from piracy is debatable. CleanFlicks claims to purchase one studio-sanctioned DVD for each edited version available to rent online. Probably the biggest worry for studios is that they didn't come up with the idea first, allowing profits to escape their clutches.

However, filmmakers don't like outsiders tinkering with their artistic works. It happens to versions shown on airplanes and network television, but that's with direct input from directors, who often shoot alternative scenes for such situations. Companies such as CleanFlicks are making their own decisions about what to censor - often dictated by conservative religious beliefs, or at least a sense of superiority over anyone who doesn't agree with their tastes.

This debate between decency and artistic freedom is the subject of Bleep: Censoring Hollywood, a one-hour documentary that debuted this week on American Movie Classics. The next broadcast is Sunday at 11:30 a.m. on AMC. It's a well-balanced piece of TV journalism, co-produced by ABC News, with advocates on both sides given chances to speak out.

In the program, an interesting compromise is offered by ClearPlay (www.clearplay.com) which invented a DVD player with capabilities to filter objectionable content. ClearPlay doesn't directly censor original content as CleanFlicks does, but gives parents choices of how much profanity, sex and violence their televisions will display.

Each content filter has 14 levels of permissiveness, allowing 16,384 potential configurations. A director might wince at the results, but it's no different than a parent covering a child's eyes and ears. And it's done in the privacy of one's home according to personal standards, not a version censored according to someone else's morals that is widely rented or sold.

Technology is providing an alternative that surveys indicate millions of Americans want. Our next topic could affect whether entertainment-based technology such as ClearPlay and CleanFlicks could be invented in the future.

The U.S. Supreme Court will soon announce its decision in the MPAA's case against Grokster.com, a Web site enabling peer-to-peer downloads of movies and music, mostly without paying licensing fees. Studios want the sites closed, the same way they want DVD pirates arrested. The case is similar to the music industry's successful litigation against Napster, which knocked that Web site out of operation until licensing fee agreements were made.

However, Grokster also has a legal precedent on its side. In 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court debated the MPAA's claim that Sony's now-defunct Betamax video recorder was an infringement of - of course - intellectual property rights. The court sided with Sony, a pro-innovation decision leading to more entertainment-based breakthroughs, especially after the personal computer boom of the 1990s.

The Consumer Electronics Association calls the court's decision "the Magna Carta for everyone who enjoys their iPods, TiVos, personal computers and electronic products."

Twenty-one years ago, the courts couldn't have predicted in-home Betamax tapings would grow into a $6-billion bootlegging industry. If the court sides with the MPAA, the result could be the demise of what National Journal's Technology Daily columnist Drew Clark calls "freedom to tinker."

"(That's) exactly what the techies fear they could lose if the Supreme Court sides with Hollywood and against Grokster," he wrote. "Why? Because every engineering decision and product design would be subject to legal review by entertainment industry lawyers."

That means if a new gadget is determined to have copyright infringement capabilities, inventors could be forced to go back to the drawing boards to create security measures. Those are cracked by teenage hackers all the time. Some inventors would give up the fight, or sell their ideas to MPAA-friendly manufacturers that could make the studios happy by keeping the technology off the market.

In other Hollywood legal news, actor Wesley Snipes, confessed his toothless vampire flick Blade: Trinity was lousy, and is suing New Line Cinema and others for making it happen.

But that's stretching the definition of "intellectual property."

- Steve Persall can be reached at 727 893-8365 or persall@sptimes.com

An anti-piracy bill before the president will make it illegal to copy movies in theaters, but has a rider that allows companies such as CleanFlicks to re-edit and sell "sanitized" films without input from filmmakers.

A case before the Supreme Court would outlaw the downloading of movies without licensing fees, as well as limit new technologies that would infringe on copyrights.

[Last modified April 28, 2005, 08:47:03]