President Bush on Wednesday signed legislation aimed at helping parents keep their children from seeing sex scenes, violence and foul language in movie DVDs.
The bill gives legal protections to the fledgling filtering technology that helps parents automatically skip or mute sections of commercial movie DVDs. Bush signed it privately and without comment, White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.
The legislation came about because Hollywood studios and directors had sued to stop the manufacture and distribution of such electronic devices for DVD players. The movies’ creators had argued that changing the content — even when it is considered offensive — would violate their copyrights.
The legislation, called the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, creates an exemption in copyright laws to make sure companies selling filtering technology won’t get sued out of existence.
Critics of the bill have argued it was aimed at helping one company, Utah-based ClearPlay, whose technology is used in some DVD players. ClearPlay sells filters for hundreds of movies that can be added to such DVD players for $4.95 each month. Hollywood executives maintain that ClearPlay should pay them licensing fees for altering their creative efforts.
Unlike ClearPlay, some other companies produce edited DVD copies of popular movies and sell them directly to consumers.
Read the complete story @ Wired
Related
- House OKs Family Copyright Bill
- Bush signs law targeting P2P pirates
- Bush and Kerry on p2p
- Bush Signs Law Creating ‘PiracyCzar’
- Bush targets South Korea, EU, and others in piracy cracdown
The more people try to censor each other the more we degrade ourselves