Utah film sanitizers defeated

Loud Orange Cat

Pro Member
indiePRO
I don't know how many of you have been watching this, but I have. After a three-year legal battle involving Utah companies that sanitize movies on DVD and VHS (like CleanFlicks), a federal judge in Denver ruled Thursday that such editing violates U.S. copyright laws and must be stopped.

The article is here. :clap:
 
I haven't been following it. That sounds interesting. So if your film had a distro deal, and that deal included sales in Utah, the local companies would edit ("clean") them before they were put up for sale? Isn't that a violation of the Constitution too!?

I could understand opting to clean the film, but not if it was done without knowledge.

I take it it's not like turning shotguns into walkie-talkies right. Sounds like they would cut the scene all together.
 
These sanitizing companies would take it upon themselves to take a movie they have no rights to, edit them and resell them.

They're nothing more than PIRATES using the name of some cult/religion to justify their illegal actions.

I'm glad they got shut down.
 
At last a victory in the battle against censorship. I wrote some scathing emails to this company when I first heard about them. I hope they go out of business now. If you don't like the content of a film, stop watching or don't go. A better solution would be for them to make their own films with the content they want, but after seeing some clips of the hack-job editing this company did, I can see why they are content with defacing the work of others instead of having the guts to put out their own work.
 
Isn't this issue more about freedom of choice? Perhaps some people would prefer to see a movie that has gratuitous sex & violence removed and lets the story (or lack of one) shine through...
 
Then shouldnt they watch a different movie because, by editing scenes out (and trust me the UK used to do this all the time under the James Ferman regeme of the BBFC) you are changing the film, editing a film makers vision without there permission.

Big up the victory I say!
 
audadvnc said:
Isn't this issue more about freedom of choice? Perhaps some people would prefer to see a movie that has gratuitous sex & violence removed and lets the story (or lack of one) shine through...
To me, this is more about the fact that anyone calling themselves a 'family' company can steal your work, edit it and resell it for profit when you have NO distribution contract with them. They're theives and PIRATES of the worst kind: They redirect your films for profit.

Even the pirates on the internet aren't low enough to reedit the film they are stealing and making available for download.

I hope the owners/operators of these 'companies' get sentenced to PMITA prison.
 
they are claiming that they buy retail / release theirs on a 1 to 1 basis to make sure the distributors/production companies don't have sales complaints. It then boils down to who's property it is and who has the right to do what with it.
 
Loud Orange Cat said:
To me, this is more about the fact that anyone calling themselves a 'family' company can steal your work, edit it and resell it for profit when you have NO distribution contract with them. They're theives and PIRATES of the worst kind: They redirect your films for profit.

Even the pirates on the internet aren't low enough to reedit the film they are stealing and making available for download.

I hope the owners/operators of these 'companies' get sentenced to PMITA prison.

Actually I missed that. Tecnically they are no better that pirates (and yep maybe worse in fact), and therefore should be treated with the same legal outlook.

But more so I don't think ANYONE has the right to edit/change or alter the work of another person without there permission (step forward Mr G Lucas and Return Of The Jedi- reediting a dead man's film).

To me altering another persons film is almost like going up to the Mona Lisa and painting out a blemish or a sun spot.
 
I don't think ANYONE has the right to edit/change or alter the work of another person without there permission
That covers a lot of ground. So should a Beethoven symphony not be shown with footage of flying blue whales as happens in Fantasia 2000, or even be shortened and played at the faster speed performed in the movie, because Beethoven had not explicitly authorized his work to be played faster, to moving images of flying blue whales?
 
In fairness I would say yes it's fine putting the song to image as they doesn't change the song ... as for changing the music, editing it... that is a tough one! I guess to stick to my answer then no they shouldn't but in reality I consider it different which I know is a major double standard.

Good point!
 
Or how about CNN/Fox News taking snippets of Al Jazeera newscasts for rebroadcast? I don't know if Osama Bin Laden cares either way whether his videotapes are quoted out of context, but others might. On the other hand, I don't watch AJ, so CNN/Fox is likely to be the only place I get to see it...
 
I believe that showing a snippet for broadcast and outright stealing the entire production for 100% profit are two different things.

As an example, if someone stole mr-modern-life's LFD, re-edited it and sold it for 100% profit behind his back, do you think he would be a happy camper? I don't think so.

These people were theives, nothing more.
 
So Fox/CNN is paying OBL for rebroadcast rights? Making videotapes is OBL's main business nowadays. If Fox/CNN is paying him then they are financially supporting worldwide terrorism, and you by extension are advocating it. Hello, Homeland Security?

Oh, wait, you're saying that Fox/CNN is NOT paying OBL for his original work, re-editing it and keeping 100% of the profits from the rebroadcasts. Then these people are theives, nothing more.
 
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No no, this is a distribution issue. This has nothing to do with the bizarre news outlet rules of 'you can show a 'X' second clip of [enter title]' of the rebroadcasting rules. They're allowed to do this under a specific ruleset. They're not stealing it, they have (limited) permission. They also have weird rebroadcast rules about foreign signals. It's hairy, but somewhat legal. CNN, NBC and the rest wouldn't intentionally ignore laws about rebroadcasting someone's signal, it costs them big bucks in fines when they do.

I'm referring specifically to the physical distribution of DVD and VHS media without a distribution contract. "CleanFlicks" and the rest are no better than the Hong Kong pirates who are making 10,000 copies of Clerks II per hour and selling them for $2USD on the street.
 
I'm glad that got quashed. Aside from the money/pirates issues, which I frankly care not for, the bigger issue is censorship. I don't want families watching dumbed down versions of my smutty cock-and-balls flicks! If someone doesn't want to watch a movie because they're offended, then fine, don't watch the damn movie! If you want to believe the holocaust never happened, then fine, don't believe it. But don't ask the museums and libraries to remove books about it because that's what you believe!

I find it funny, in the original article, it actually says that the companies in question filed a suit against the film industry originally, and they were the ones who got hit on the backswing... despite Bush actually signing a the Family Movie bill thing, which legalized the technology... it didn't legalize thier actions. Like- if they REALLY want to censor like that, there must be a better way. And I have it:

A helmet with speakers and toggle eye-blinds, all controlled by a remote. Sit the kid in the chair, put the helmet on, and every time something objectionable comes on the tube, just click the button and the blinds come down, flashing strobe lights at the kids, while loud Christian rock plays through the ear phones. If anything, perhaps some very Clockwork Orangey aversions might come out of it... and leave our kids more sensitive and vulnerable than they already are (with censorship).

What ever happened to the good old days, when we would take our kids out in the country and kill a buffalo or something? We try so hard to protect our kids from violence, sex and drugs, but in the end, they'll just fall harder because they have no backbone of knowledge. I say once every kid reaches puberty, ship them off to fight in the Middle East. Then if they survive, make them watch all of Kevin Smith's films over and over, get them drunk and smoke them up, shoot them with heroin, anally rape them (which is double plus if you're the daddy), and then lock them in a small room for a year, throwing scraps of raw meat to them once a week (which they will have to fight the rats for to eat).

If that doesn't teach them to be responsible, then censor that above paragraph and it'll read like this "I say once every kid reaches puberty, have a serious talk about stuff with them". That's probably the better way, but the fact is, some people out there will chuckle at what I say and some will feel repulsed. Either way, I still get to say it, and THAT's the beauty of a free society!

Please don't ban me... oh god, please don't ban me!!
 
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To me, this is more about the fact that anyone calling themselves a 'family' company can steal your work, edit it and resell it for profit when you have NO distribution contract with them. They're theives and PIRATES of the worst kind: They redirect your films for profit.
...outright stealing the entire production for 100% profit...
Do you have a source on this? I do not believe the mission of these companies is to edit (or clean) every single copy of a movie in existance. All they did was find a niche market of people willing to pay extra for cleaned up (scrubbed) copies of popular movies.

Don't ask me, it's a Christian thing.

All they do is edit and sell these 'scrubbed' copies to rental companies and private owners who do not want the nude or crude language in their movies. This is a service, not retail. The rental houses and retail outlets still pay the right people for the movies. They just pay a little more to have it scrubbed then pass this extra cost on to the consumer.

The article Robert linked does not make it clear but the judge in the ruling actually said, "The essence of copyright law is for content makers to have control over their works." Now this I agree with. If I spent 28 million on a movie I would want to get every dime back out of it. So from that perspective, I can see the Hollywood corporation wanting to exploit this niche market for themselves. After all they deserve it.

What baffles me is why the directors guild cares? I mean I can see their point about my movie is a work of art so don't touch it but honestly, after the movie gets made and they get paid, what do they care? They do it to writers all the damn time. I don't see the WGA filing any lawsuits.

I also don't hear any directors complaining when it gets edited for TV, why should they get bent out of shape when it gets edited for Mormons and other Christian variations? If they sell and rent scrubbed versions of movies to these people that just means more money. I don't see the harm in that as long as the people who own the copyright are in control of the process and right now they're not, hence the ruling.

None of this effects the companies who make the software that does the editing on the fly. Although the directors guild says this concerns them too. And again, why?
 
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The opinion is relatively short, and worth reading if you’re interested in copyright. The judge ruled that CleanFlicks violated the studios’ exclusive rights to make copies of the movies, and to distribute copies to the public. He said that what CleanFlicks did was not fair use.

There are at least four interesting aspects to the opinion.

First, the judge utterly rejected CleanFlicks’s public policy argument. CleanFlicks had argued that public policy should favor allowing its business, because it enables people with different moral standards to watch movies, and it lets people compare the redacted and unredacted versions to decide whether the language, sex, and violence are really necessary to the films. The judge noted that Congress, in debating and passing the Family Movie Act, during the pendency of this lawsuit, had chosen to legalize redaction technologies that didn’t make a new DVD copy, but had not legalized those like CleanFlicks that did make a copy. He said, reasonably, that he did not want to overrule Congress on this policy issue. But he went farther, saying that this public policy argument is “inconsequential to copyright law” (page 7).

Second, the judge ruled that the redacted copies of the movies are not derivative works. His reasoning here strikes me as odd. He says first that the redaction is not a transformative use, because it removes material but doesn’t add anything. He then says that because the redacted version is not transformative, it is not a derivative work (page 11). If it is true in general that redaction does not create a derivative work, this has interesting consequences for commercial-skipping technologies — my understanding is that the main copyright-law objection to commercial-skipping is that it creates an unauthorized derivative work by redacting the commercials.

Third, the judge was unimpressed with CleanFlicks’s argument that it wasn’t reducing the studios’ profits, and was possibly even increasing them by bringing the movie to people who wouldn’t have bought it otherwise. (Recall that for every redacted copy it sold, CleanFlicks bought and warehoused one ordinary studio-issued DVD; so every CleanFlicks sale generated a sale for the studio.) The judge didn’t much engage this economic argument but instead stuck to a moral-rights view that CleanFlicks was injuring the artistic integrity of the films:

The argument [that CleanFlicks has no impact or a positive impact on studio revenues] has superficial appeal but it ignores the intrinsic value of the right to control the content of the copyrighted work which is the essence of the law of copyright.
(page 11)

Finally, the judge notes that the studios did not make a DMCA claim, even though CleanFlicks was circumventing the encryption on DVDs into order to enable its editing. (The studios say they could have brought such a claim but chose not to.) Why they chose not to is an interesting question. I think Tim Lee is probably right here: the studios were feeling defensive about the overbreadth of the DMCA, so they didn’t want to generate more conservative opponents of the DMCA by winning this case on DMCA grounds.

There also seems to have been no claim that CleanFlicks fostered infringement by releasing its copies as unencrypted DVDs, when the original studio DVDs had been encrypted with CSS (the standard, laughably weak DVD encryption scheme). The judge takes care to note that CleanFlicks and its co-parties all release their edited DVDs in unencrypted form, but his ruling doesn’t seem to rely on this fact. Presumably the studios chose not to make this argument either, perhaps for reasons similar to their DMCA non-claim.

In theory CleanFlicks can appeal this decision, but my guess is that they’ll run out of money and fold before any appeal can happen. The truly funny thing here is that if you go to cleanflicks.com, they're running a "going out of business sale". :lol:

A PDF copy of the ruling is here.
 
I'm tired of taking the 'angry, upset director' side. I don't want to make enemies.

I gleamed some of the material from the PDF ruling and freedom-to-tinker.com, a more level headed, director-friendly side of this opinion. I should have given credit in the original post, my apologies. I admit, it's not all mine, but it does convey the true facts of the case without me going into another "I hate these guys! They should be taken down! They're pirates!" childish rant.

The judge said their actions are not fair use and infringe on the rights of the filmmakers. It's pretty simple in my opinion, however your mileage may vary. :)
 
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