Beyond Bleeping
Stephane Fitch of Forbes suggests that letting consumers legally clean up DVDs is only the beginning.
LOS ANGELES - You tinker with the recipes in Bon Appetit and add ice cubes to your white wine. You prefer the shuffle mode on your iPod and you skip the boring parts of The Tonight Show with your TiVo. Now, thanks to the U.S. Congress, maybe you can skip the boring parts of movies, too.
No, this wasn't really what legislators intended. The Family Movie Act of 2005, signed by President George W. Bush on Wednesday, was aimed at folks who use software to cut out four-letter words, nudity and graphic violence from movies they rent or buy for home viewing.
But the law may also loosen Hollywood's tight control over its products. It passes some of the control over how movies are edited to you and, hypothetically, a mini-industry of movie remix artists.
As long as movie creators get to see their work on screen, reap the profits, and get credit for their ideas, I don't see any reason they should object to private remakes. It's just another example of user innovation. Maybe moviemakers should try to emulate other industries and see how they can tap, rather than stamp out or grudgingly tolerate, user ideas.