Variety reports a judge has decided that it’s not ok to edit films, removing things you find offensive, then sell the edited version. Well, duh. It is ok, however, to use technology to skip over or mute stuff you don’t want to see or hear. That seems fair to me, too.
One thought on “Judge Rules on Film Censorship”
Comments are closed.
Well, the big mistake that “Clean Flix” or “Dirt Busters” (or whatever they call themselves) made is that they sold the cleaned-up movies as copies of the original. This is piracy. If they had sold the movie along with a copy of the original movie, they would have been protected under the “fair use” law. In this case, they are only aiding me — the techno imbecilic viewer — in creating my own copy of the movie which I own. I can then watch the original or the cleaned-up copy.
There is another service that downloads the FF and MUTE information onto a DVD player that then plays a cleaned-up version of the movie that you own. The only downside is that I believe this is a subscription service, and you have to wait until they provide a “clean” template for the movie that you want to watch.
In a related bummer, my HDTV and HDMI digital connection make it impossible for me to use my Foul-Language Guardian device. It uses the composite video cable to mute foul language. But I have no way to pass this information to the HDMI audio signal !!!