Warning: This DVD Contains No Sex

Should you have the right to watch movies in the privacy of your home–with
the naughty bits cut out? Digital technology makes it possible to create
software that filters out strong language, sex, and violence in DVD films. But
in yet another of the endless battles over digital rights, directors and studios
are trying to halt on-the-fly alteration of their work.

A Salt Lake City startup called ClearPlay Inc. has created software filters
for hundreds of movies including such hits as Goldmember and Minority Report.
Currently, ClearPlay works only on movies that are played on a Windows PC. A
$7.95 monthly subscription gives you access to all the filters: You supply the
DVDs. The software detects what disk is in the drive and loads the right filter
file. The company plans to market a ClearPlay-equipped stand-alone DVD player
later this year.

ClearPlay editors review the movies and decide what items should be skipped
during replay. The result: anything from brief gaps in a soundtrack to peculiar
jumps that can render sizable chunks of a movie incomprehensible. The standard
for offensive language is rigid. Violence is a lot more acceptable, provided it’s
not too gory. ClearPlay oddly rates the edited version as being violence-free.
The attitude toward sex is reminiscent of the old Hollywood Production Code:
Anything explicit is cut, but even heavy-handed innuendo survives. One
difficulty with the system is that the ClearPlay DVD player software is not very
good. The program offers no straightforward way to get to a DVD’s menu for
features other than the movie itself . Worse, I found the player often locked up
when I tried to fast-forward or rewind. You can, however, turn the filtering off
by supplying a password. One unusual feature of the player: a fine tuner for the
timing of the deletions because the cuts are based on the DVD’s time code,
which not all PCs handle accurately.

The future of ClearPlay, however, depends more on legal maneuvering than
software quality. The tale starts with another Utah startup called Clean Flicks,
which, instead of providing filters, actually sells and rents cleaned-up movies
on tape and DVD. Clean Flicks gets around the obvious copyright problem by
buying one legal copy for each one it sells. But the directors’ and studios’
case rests on a different argument: The law prohibits altering a protected work
without the permission of the copyright holder. The case, now in discovery in
federal court in Denver, was later extended to include ClearPlay. Although it is
a single case, the situations are different. I think Clean Flicks clearly
violates the ban on the creation of unauthorized derivative works. ClearPlay
argues that because the editing doesn’t actually remove any part of a movie
they’ve done nothing illegal. The same issue has been raised in TV studios’
case against SONICblue’s ReplayTV (SBLU ), in which the studios claim that
automatically deleting commercials on playback constitutes creation of a
derivative work. In the ClearPlay case, the complaints have some validity. But I
would be more sympathetic to the plaintiffs’ worries about the artistic
integrity of the work if they didn’t license them to be chopped up to make
room for commercials on television or cleaned up for showing on airplanes and
elsewhere. In the end, though, it’s hard to tell who is injured if people
watch mangled movies in the privacy of their own homes. I wouldn’t choose to
do it, but I can’t see why others shouldn’t have the right.

By Stephen H Wildstrom 
in BusinessWeek. Copyright 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc