About a year ago I posted a thread on SDMB about the way some companies are using the potential of DVD players to unilaterally censor Hollywood movies. There was a court case involved, I don’t know how it came out, but you can now buy censoring DVDs in Walmart.
Here’s a news article about the ClearPlay DVDs showing up in Walmart.
Here’s a link to the original gangsta thread about Clearplay.
Is anyone using the new tech as I suggested? Not that I know of …
ClearPlay seems like a good idea all around. What seems to be a bit confused in the OP and a bit confused in the article, is some people are talking about “edited DVDs” which it does not appear ClearPlay has any involvement in. ClearPlay takes original version DVDs and simply modifies how they appear on a screen, with options customizable by the user.
I honestly don’t see where Hollywood has a leg to stand on with this one. ClearPlay isn’t altering the DVD, their player just gives the user specific options that can change how they watch it. I don’t see it as any different from someone blacking out a section of a novel they don’t wish to read, that wouldn’t justify the novelist bringing suit against the person, or the pen manufacturer.
As to the OPs “reverse censoring” idea in the thread he linked, I don’t know that that will catch on (I’m assuming his suggestion is genuine.) It would require hiring someone to do filming, the additional scenes and etc, basically it creates a significant expense not found in a censoring process. Also, pornography is widely available, and I think most people who want to watch bondage DVDs would prefer to just watch bondage porn bought form a local adult video store instead of watching a major Hollywood movie with poorly done bondage scenes spliced in.
I think that the confusion arises from the fact that, however the technology itself works, what you wind up with is something that might as well be an edited DVD.
Whether you blank out scenes or add in scenes, you are changing the original work in order to make it more to the liking of a specific audience. Hollywood’s argument seems to hinge on the fact that this violates the intent of the creator, hence is an infringement on his rights. I agree this argument is considerably weakened by the fact that ClearPlay doesn’t alter the origianl and so far as I know the purchaser can still watch the unaltered version if they want to. But hell, I’m not about to second-guess lawyers and judges. Their judgments often completely leave the sphere of common sense.
Bondage is a tiny subset of the market for this stuff. The REAL market would be vanilla porn addenda to mainstream movies. Look at all the Photoshopped versions of celebrity hotties on the Net. Think there isn’t a market out there for videos that are the equivalent?
No, of course not. Why would anyone want that? Porn is readily available. The presence of “celebrity hotties” is irrelevant because said “hotties” are not likely to shoot pornographic scenes for the benefit of the “extra uncensored” version. If someone is looking for porn, they’re far more likely to seek porn rather than watch an entire movie just for five minutes of porn clumsily edited into it.
But aren’t you already doing this if you use your DVD player to skip a scene, or to skip to a specific “chapter,” or to watch a movie with subtitles or in a different language?
I think this is the perfect way to get this done without violating copyright. Creators have copyrights, which means they get to control when their work is copied, distributed and sold. They do not have the right to ensure the “integrity” of their work. If you wanted every copy of work to be unchanged and perfect for all time, don’t sell them on DVD, problem solved.
The CleanFlicks people did violate copyright, IMHO, because they created near identical copies of the original work, and marketed them. ClearPlay doesn’t do this, they only automate the same skipping and muting functions that consumers have the right to use whenever they want. It’ll be a cold day in hell when I accept that Sony has the right to tell me I can’t fast forward through part of a movie that I bought, on my own television. I wonder if that’s a “feature” of Blu-Ray?
Of course the hotties themselves are not. But women made up to look almost like them would. And you’re right about the porn, if it was just five minutes. Why would the “extras” folks have to limit themselves so greatly. They could add in, say, four 15 or 20 minutes scenes at various points in the film. So what if it ran for three and a half hours? Probably the viewers would just pick a section of movie that leads in to the extended scene and start there, and watch the whole movie in sections, as it were.
I personally am not so interested in celebrities, but I’ve seen so much interest in it on the Web that I’d be very surprised if such a venture wasn’t successful. The only question is, would viewers be able to make the “suspension of disbelief” necessary to accept that the two pornsters doing the extras scene represents the two characters in the story? That might be an issue, but your notion that there’s no one interested in an “extended” scene between, say, Kate Winslet and Johnny Depp in Finding Neverland is very silly indeed.
The same could be said of reading a book’s pages out of order, or as it’s also known, skipping to the “good parts.” But the people who are censorsing the DVDs are changing the contents of the book, just like anyone else might be.
Y’know, this could be the start of a new and enormously lucrative industry for Hollywood, customizable films, if they had the sense to embrace it. But I don’t think any of them would have the sense to do so.
Isn’t this already the case with the FBI warnings and other disclaimer crap at the beginning? :mad:
Were these invented by George W. Bush?
Yes. UOP (User Operation Prohibitions) flags can be applied to any part of the DVD content - although they only work if the player is set to honour them, which they all are by default, but can be turned off on some players.
Yep, they missed a golden opportunity. All they had to do was contract with the copyright holders. I’m given to understand that’s what the airlines do with the
And for us minimalist (since I haven’t picked up the new TV yet), there’s always the volume control.
Do y’all remember that poster who asserted it’s unethical to skip the advertisements?
I see this new tech as a golden opportunity. Used right, it could create a whole new industry of video “add-ons” to popular move properties. More choice for the consumer, more opportunities for creativity, more work for actors, writers, models, etc. Because ultimately, it wouldn’t be just sexual “extras” that would be created. It would be all kinds of extras. Kinda like the Japanese doujinshi publishing industry, which help ensure that manga thrive while the US comic industry withers on the vine.
But I don’t think it’ll happen. The moviemakers will short-sightedly oppose other people adding to their vision, especially in sexual ways. (Porn is generally the first colonizer of new media, that’s whyI’m starting with it.) Like the comic book people, they’ll cut off their noses to spite their faces. And the moral conservatives who love ClearPlay alterations of movies because it gives viewers a choice will oppose sexually-oriented extras for exactly the same reason – it gives viewers a choice they’d rather viewers didn’t have. Combined, they’ll be hard to overcome.
There is a very small market for this kind of thing. Specifically, there’s you. No one else is going to want a bunch of random crap edited into a movie. I don’t know why that’s not obvious to you. If you want pornography clumsily edited into a normal movie, watch Caligula. (Actually, I have no doubt that you’ve seen it already.) The results aren’t pretty. Perhaps you don’t have patience with the concept of movie-making as art and don’t see why someone might want to see a film as the director intended. Even so, why would you want a bunch of extraneous crap spliced into a film? What could possibly be the value of it? I understand that you want to infuse pornography into every aspect of your life, but you need to recognize that that’s not a common desire. I’m quite happy watching a movie and then looking at porn (or vice versa), and so are most people.
As I’ve said, all the images on the web with celebrities’ faces pasted over porn stars’ bodies doing their porn thing indicates otherwise. I didn’t create all those pics personally, in fact, I never found it an interesting pursuit, even though I’m good with Photoshop. I just see this very well-known aspect of the Web as evidence of a large, untapped market. What is your response to that point?
As for the ad hominem stuff, I believe I will ignore that.
Moderator’s Note: Let’s please keep this discussion focused on the merits or lack thereof of “ClearPlay”, or the general subject of the propriety of changing or editing works of art after the fact, rather than getting into the personal tastes of other posters on the board.
My response is that no one wants porn spliced into movies. Isn’t that what I said? The fact that people are interested in seeing naked celebrities (or fake images purporting to be naked celebrities) doesn’t mean that anyone wants to see porn clumsily added to real movies. There’s lots of attractive celebrities out there - heck, if there were porn actors who looked distinctly like attractive celebrities, I’d probably be interested (after all, if I’m attracted to a celebrity, I’ll probably be attracted to someone who looks like them.) But I don’t see why you imagine that most people would want to see that edited into a movie. Again, if I’m watching a movie, I’m hardly likely to want it to cut away to porn in the middle. Why would anyone? If a person wants to look at porn, it’s readily available. Why would you need it in the middle of a real movie?
I’m not sure why you keep saying you’re not interested in fake pornographic images of celebrities. Didn’t you once start a pit thread regarding an auction of an image you Photoshopped of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera in a half-naked bondage scene? Obviously you have an interest in fake nudes of celebrities - the question is why you think it follows that people would want to see that cut into a movie. I daresay a lot of people are quite interested in naked celebrities - I don’t think you’re particularly unique in that interest. But it simply doesn’t follow that most people are interested in celebrity lookalike porn interrupting a movie.
I like good food. I occasionally watch cooking shows. That doesn’t mean I want a movie to cut into a Meryl Streep lookalike giving instructions on how to make a soufflé. What’s the difference here? If I want to watch a cooking show, I want to watch a cooking show. If I want to watch a movie, I want to watch a movie. Occasionally those two things might even intersect a little bit - if a movie is about a chef, there could easily be scenes involving them cooking - much like a romantic movie can involve sex scenes (of course, there’s a difference between a cooking show and a scene in a movie involving cooking - much like there’s a difference between a porn film and a movie that shows some flesh in an erotic context.) It just doesn’t stand to reason that I want to see Ilsa Lund start making a chiffon cake in the middle of Casablanca. The fact that I have two different interests doesn’t mean I necessarily have any particular desire to see them combined. Isn’t that pretty much true of most people? I certainly wouldn’t be pleased if I was having sex and my partner decided to pause in the middle to whip up some stuffed peppers, or start arguing with me about Chomsky’s contributions to modern syntax. (Noam Chomsky: now there’s an image to make an erection go away forever.)
On the other hand, I can imagine getting a stir of sadistic glee at tricking someone into watching porn with actors who look like, say, Jack Black or Kathy Bates.
Surely if there were a lot of people interested in this sort of thing, you’d already be able to bittorrent Casablanca:The Threesome Edition? Nowadays anyone with Final Cut or similar can recut a movie if they are willing to spend some time on it, and given the level of obsessiveness people exhibit in pursuing their fetishes on the net, someone would have done it. But instead they seem to prefer editing Jar-Jar Binks out of The Phantom Menace.
A major obstacle here is that you have the right to control how your likeness is used commercially.
Suppose you were a popular rock guitarist, and a guitar manufacturer started using an actor made-up to look like you in his print and TV ads, or using still photos and video footage from your concerts without your permission. You can sue his butt off. He doesn’t have the right to use your likeness to make money without your permission.
Any actor whose film was altered (even if the alteration is not to the DVD or tape itself, but only on the screen) to make it seem that he/she was having sex in front of the cameria would have an excellent case against a porn producer who tried to manufacture and sell such a device.
I hate the little message that pops up on the screen when I try to FF past the opening warnings, “Action Disallowed by Disc” or some such message. I think it should say “Action Disallowed by FBI” or whatever group or agency inserted the UOP flags.