Tom, I too (as an IP attorney) find the copyright decision to be somewhat bizarre. In Clean Flicks v. Steven Soderbergh, a “federal district court in Utah held that companies that “sanitize” … motion pictures by removing sex, profanity, and violence, violate the motion picture studios’ copyright.”
The court thought it was an easy case, apparently. So does this law professor, who said “This case was about as straightforward a copyright case as there can be, and the court’s determination is plainly correct”.
As the court wrote:
CleanFlicks first obtains an original copy of the movie from its customer or by its own purchase from an authorized retailer. It then makes a digital copy of the entire movie onto the hard drive of a computer, overcoming such technology as a digital content scrambling protection system in the acquired DVD, that is designed to prevent copying. After using software to make the edits, the company downloads from the computer an edited master copy which is then used to create a new recordable DVDR to be sold to the public, directly or indirectly through a retailer. Thus, the content of the authorized DVD has been changed and the encryption removed. The DVDR bears the CleanFlicks trademark. CleanFlicks makes direct sales and rentals to consumers online through its website requiring the purchaser to buy both the authorized and edited copies. CleanFlicks purchases an authorized copy of each edited copy it rents. CleanFlicks stops selling to any retailer that makes unauthorized copies of an edited movie. … CleanFilms maintains an inventory of the unedited versions of the copies it rents or sells to its members in a one-to-one ratio. [italics added]
Note that CleanFilms buys one copy for every edited (sanitized) copy they rent. It seems to me, therefore, that this is just the digital version of physically removing parts of an analog movie on videotape. For example, suppose CleanFilms bought 1000 VHS tape versions of a movie, and physically removed lengths of tape that had nudity, then spliced it back together. Or, what if they just put white tape over the nudity-section of the film, or “erased” those lenghts of tape, then re-sold the VHS tape. Or what if technology were developed that let them shoot a laser into the DVD and basically just blot out the sections of video that contained nudity? Could it be argued that any of this is is copying or reproducing the movie? If not, why is the digital version of this any different? The fact that copyright law treats them differently shows how arbitrary and unjust it is.
3:28 pm on July 14, 2006
