Your Own Personal Censor

President Bush yesterday signed a new copyright bill, the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, that allows you to legally bowdlerize the film of your choice in the privacy of your own living room. Hollywood agreed not to fight the provision in exchange for much tougher penalties--three years for a first offense-- against pirating movies. (Is the film biz really in danger of going under due to some guy with a video camera in the seventh row? Last I looked, industry profits seemed to be doing OK.) The Director's Guild is reportedly still not happy, and who can blame them? This effectively puts into place a mechanism to "protect" the public from their work.

For the time being, the new law will primarily benefit ClearPlay, a Utah company that features cultural scold Michael Medved on its advisory board. ClearPlay will sell you a DVD player with built-in filters that will edit out unacceptable content while you watch a movie you've bought or rented. (By the way, this practice is not called censoring, bowdlerizing, or even editing--ClearPlay refers to it as sanitizing.) This just affects playback and does not change the DVD itself, and according to the new law, it does not violate the copyright of the DVD. Other companies have been buying copies of movies, cleansing them as they saw fit, making copies of the new versions, and selling or renting those copies. The new law does not protect these companies from being sued.

According to a list on ClearPlay's site, filters are available for Hotel Rwanda (genocide can really overdo the violence), The Woodsman (who wants to be distracted by sex during a nice outdoorsy movie?), and The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (I don't have kids, so I'll have to rely on informed readers to let me know what smut I'm spared here). A report on Morning Edition yesterday discussed another company, Nissim, which is currently in a patent dispute with ClearPlay. Nissim claims it's going to release a competing filtering system that will let viewers cut out whatever parts of a movie they want. If you want just the sex, violence, and crude language, you can sanitize away the rest of the filler material.

I can see my weekend plans falling into place already. After consulting the list of available filters again, I'll order up one of the ClearPlay DVD players and pop in Fatal Attraction for twenty minutes of good, clean fun.