DVD Filtering Legalized: Family Friendly or Affront to Artistic Vision?

On April 27, 2005, US President Bush signed into law the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005 (S 167 and HR 357) (Act) ensuring that movie-filtering technologies are protected from trade-mark and copyright infringement claims (see E-TIPS® Vol 3, No. 19, March 9, 2005). As background, the Act has a litigation history dating back to 2002, when the Director's Guild of America and major Hollywood studios sued a number of companies that edit motion picture content. Taking centre stage in the dispute was ClearPlay Inc (ClearPlay), a Utah-based company that sells a DVD filtering technology allowing a viewer to skip or mute content deemed objectionable (such as violence or profanity), also described as parental control or DVD "sanitizing" technology. Supporters of the technology claimed that it enabled viewers to do what they had a right to do, namely, to choose what portions of a movie to view in the privacy of their homes, and that it assisted parents in monitoring what their children were seeing. The movie industry took quite another view, alleging that it violated copyright and trade-mark rights by altering original works and that it infringed a film's integrity and artistic vision. Critics of the Act say the legislation was aimed specifically at helping ClearPlay sell its filtering technology; while that is arguable, the signing of the Act has rendered moot the intellectual property claims against ClearPlay. ClearPlay currently has no competitors in the US market and consumer demand for the kind of technology it offers is evident. DVD players incorporating ClearPlay's technology, for example, have found their way to shelves of major retailers like Walmart and Kmart, although some manufacturers have pulled back their products in light of a patent infringement claim against the company brought by Nissim Corp (Nissim Corp v ClearPlay, No 04-21140 SD Fla Filed May 13, 2004). For related news reports, see: http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2005/04/27/Arts/050427bush.html http://makeashorterlink.com/?Y11152F0B To review the position of the Director's Guild of America on film editing, visit: http://www.dga.org/news/v29_1/dgastance-june17.php3 For the Report of the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary regarding the Act, see: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/R?cp109:FLD010:@1(hr033) Summary by: Rosa Kim