A Not So ClearPlay

A Thursday night and nothing worth my attention on TV (yet it is on anyway). This seems like a good time for this post.

A paper of mine is getting published this month on the edited movie industry and the copyright implications involved in the Cleanflicks case and the Family Movie Act. I won't bore anyone with the details, but its essentially my chance to comment on whether or not I think the various facets of the industry are "legal."

One of those arguments is already moot, since the Family Movie Act has made the ClearPlay technology legal. ClearPlay manufactures a DVD player onto which you can load filters, which will mute or skip objectionable parts of movies. This has been especially well received in Utah, since most of the population are members of the LDS church, which teaches movies with objectionable material should be avoided.

(A side note: This made for interesting conversation in Utah for awhile, where the instant reaction of many was that the technology was illegal and infringing. This gave many of those members already watching objectionable movies some reason to feel self-righteous, even to the level of pointing fingers in the opinion letters of local newspapers: We may be watching bad movies, but at least we're not breaking the law like the hypocrites who patronize CleanFlicks and Clearplay! [Hypocrisy being a favorite attack on those who words or actions prick the conscience]. The satisfaction they apparently found in that comparison was at once enfuriating, mildly entertaining, and more than a little disconcerting. As time has bourne out, it was also a bit premature.)

Anyway, so with ClearPlay now getting the green light from the Federal Government and the fact that we'd given away our DVD player, it seemed like a good time to try out ClearPlay for myself.

We ordered the latest model DVD player that came with a year's subscription to the filters and were pleased at the prospects of a new library of movies now being open to us.

It turned out, though, that we just didn't feel comfortable. The problem wasn' t the DVD player itself, or the technology necessarily. Rather, even with the filters loaded on the DVD player, we couldn't much stand the thought of having the original, unedited, copies of many of these objectionable movies in our house. For whatever reason, they still posed a threat such that we did not feel comfortable having them around.

Of course, with that being the case, there was little reason to even have the ClearPlay DVD player in the house--so we returned it and got a regular one over $100 cheaper.

There was another issue, though, that we never got around to, but that has been on my mind for some time. It's that by patronizing the edited movie industry, one is still lending financial support to the very studios who make such objectionable movies, and even more specifically to the objectionable movies themselves! (Since you have to someone be in possession of the original movie to be view the edited version). The concern always seemed mostly academic to me, one of those things that might make me uncomfortable if I bothered thinking about it long enough, but that ultimately felt too abstract to cause any real worry.

At least one purveyor of the edited movie technology, though, took it seriously enough to abandon the practice of simply editing Hollywood's fare.

For now, though, we've decided that if edited movies are going to exist in any form in our house, it's probably going to be through CleanFlicks, which burns an edited copy of the movie onto the DVD itself. Unfortunately, this is also the form most vulnerable to be found infringing (though I think there's a compelling argument to find otherwise!). This issue seems to swallow, for the moment, any meaningful talk about supporting the very content we're seeking to avoid.

Perhaps once the legality has been decided (definitively) I'll then be ready to talk about whether my patronage makes me a hypocrite.