There is a home version of this called ClearPlay that auto-redacts movies and TV. It actually started with DVD players (!) but now does streaming.
1. VidAngel purchases a bunch of Blu-ray discs and stores them in a warehouse
2. Tag all the content of a film and create filters so the user can, for example, filter out all sex and violence but leave in vulgarity
3. User "purchases" a Blu-ray for $20 (!!) and VidAngel says, "since we now know you're the owner of this copy sitting in the warehouse, we'll stream it to you right now instead of going to the bother of mailing it out" (This part legally qualified as a "performance", which was their big mistake.)
4. When user is done watching the film, VidAngel automatically buys back the Blu-ray – still sitting in their warehouse – for $19.
So users could essentially stream any film they want (with optional self-selected censorship) for only $1 per viewing. Of course they get a flood of users since they're the cheapest shop in town, and of course since what they were doing was illegal they got taken to court and had to shut down 90% of their business.
And then, they wrote an endless tream of publicity saying, "Big media doesn't want to give you the right to skip nudity and violence in your own home! Think of the children! They want to force their values on you!" Yeah, I don't think the film-makers loved the censorship platform, but it was the $1 performances that really got them riled up.
To put it in the Supreme Court's exact words: "Given Aereo’s overwhelming likeness to the cable companies targeted by the 1976 amendments, this sole technological difference between Aereo and traditional cable companies does not make a critical difference here."
“We came within one vote of declaring the VCR contraband 30 years ago in Sony [v. Universal]. The dissent in that case was driven in part by the plaintiffs’ prediction that VCR technology would wreak all manner of havoc in the television and movie industries. The Networks make similarly dire predictions about Aereo. We are told that nothing less than ‘the very existence of broadcast television as we know it’ is at stake. Aereo and its amici dispute those forecasts and make a few of their own.… We are in no position to judge the validity of those self-interested claims or to foresee the path of future technological development. Hence, the proper course is not to bend and twist the Act’s terms in an effort to produce a just outcome, but to apply the law as it stands…”
The woman reported her children kidnapped and showed the order to the police and they refused to do anything and said she should just wait and he would probably come back.
The man showed up at the police station a day later with her 3 children, dead.
So now we have the precedent that even in the most extreme and obvious cases, police have absolutely no duty to uphold their oath.
Thanks Scalia.
In general, it's worth keeping in mind that the point of courts is not to decide whether the outcome of the case is ethically or socially desirable. They're there to look at the laws and precedent and figure out how it applies to a given case. If the result is undesirable, it's something for the legislature to fix.
Ah, the old "we're here to talk about laws, not justice" argument.
Programmers seem to think about the law like a program, like a set of rules governing system behaviour and so long as they are not directly violated, this one neat trick judges hate will let them do whatever it is without recourse. But that's not true, firstly because the law is fuzzy and deals with human behaviour, including taking wider views, intent and mitigating circumstances into account, and secondly taking decades or centuries of established case law into account too.
It's why things like "smart contracts" are not the end run around the judicial process that their creators would like...
The ruling also managed to make the law even more inconsistent. If I rent an antenna and install it in a datacenter for TV, that's kosher. If I rent an antenna and pay someone else to install it in a datacenter for TV, that's a copyright violation.
But also I won't deny the copyright owners have done a great job in making the law do exactly what they want it to, nothing more and nothing less.
Doing a thing, but with Jesus branding, can get you very far in America beyond all logic. See also: nonprofits participating in politics, nonprofits doing public performances without proper licensing, nonprofits advertising to children in public schools, etc.
In other contexts on sites like this, "do [common thing] but on a computer" patents get mocked and derided because "but on a computer" is seen as a farce, not a fundamental difference from the [common thing].
Anyway, I guess the mormons could get around this and achieve their desired effect by instead selling DVD players with a subscription to a service that distributes EDL files; instructions to the DVD player about which parts of movies should be skipped.
You need to purchase rights to display the video in public. No one can stop you from renting out the tape. You already possess the right to rent out your own property.
IIRC, they then hatched a scheme where the retail availability of new movies on VHS would be restricted at least for a time, forcing video rental shops to pay more for copies of popular new movies.
You can't buy a DVD and charge tickets to see the DVD played by you. You can't stream the DVD's contents over the Internet. But you can absolutely rent the DVD itself.
That'd avoid all the "breaking the DRM", "modifying the data", etc.
As provider you just offer a device that loads dvds from a user's in-datacenter storage cabinet into their in-datacenter dvd drives, and rent them a dvd drive.
That might be complicated enough to avoid the whole "performance" interpretation
Right. Aereo notwithstanding, one way around this might be to set it up like MP3Tunes[1] where you're a specialized digital locker service. The "fixed" "tangible medium" should originate with the customer, and a transfer from the customer-controlled copy to the business should be involved (rather than the other way around). With a large enough physical presence, you could get this down to pizza delivery time frames and/or Redbox levels of friction.
1. contrast with mp3.com
There is, strictly speaking—it's part of the exclusive rights that Title 17 lays out for copyright owners[1]. It's just that (a) it forces you to be in the business of doing the rentals yourself (you don't get to just point at someone with an interest doing rentals and dictate terms to them, sans contract), and (b) even if you're doing your own rentals, if you're also selling copies, then there's nothing stopping someone from doing an end-run around your rental business by just buying a copy from you and doing things their way with that copy.
(Granted, this doesn't make the person you were replying to any more correct about what they meant when they said you couldn't do this.)
1. "distribute copies [...] by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending"
I think they eventually stopped doing it just to appease the production companies and avoid their frivolous lawsuits.
If I remember correctly, they tried to buy from the company - Disney IIRC - but they were refused sale. Instead, they simply bought retail and rented those.
The only reason rentals worked was because of the physical constraints that limited the distribution of each copy. Take that away, what you're left with is just thinly veiled copyright abolishment.
Instead, the solution that the USA's current legal system is going with is "You _can_ run an online rental service, as long as you have the copyright owner's permission (e.g., you have a contract with them in which you give them money and they give you their permission)"
It should require no cooperation to build an online version of DVD rental.
> It doesn’t fall under first sale doctrine if you stream a transcoded copy of the DVD you bought. This is why the laws around digital distribution and copyright aren’t exactly the same as the laws around physical distribution and copyright.
I don't think transcoding should matter, at least if it's done on the fly, but also it's entirely doable to throw raw DVD bits over the wire. And neither one should count as a copy any more than shining light onto a book makes "copies".
Except for all the pre-digital precedent that informs and agrees with my opinion.
> The shining light analogy is a little hyperbolic, I’m sure you know. Transcoding & streaming definitely is making a copy, because the bits exist in two places.
I don't think it reaches hyperbole. The bits only need to exist in two places for milliseconds. It should not count as a copy. It's only a copy in a pedantic technical sense.
> The point of copyright law is to give copyrights holder control over who gets to distribute and who gets to consume, and it may not make any difference whether there’s technically copying involved according to however you define copying.
Except they're supposed to lose a huge amount of control after the first sale. This feature of copyright is broken for digital items.
I mean, Europe's already working on it. I think we'll get there eventually.
And I'm not claiming most of what you seem to think I am.
Just like you can't lend out individual chapters of a book....
You can't? If I buy a physical book, I can't rip a page out of it and sell that to you? That's certainly the first I've heard of any such law.
What you can’t (legally) do is copy a page of your book and sell it/give it away (though maybe one could argue that a mere page would be a small enough excerpt to fall under fair use).
VidAngel (and the hypothetical 10 second streamer) fall under the latter, since streaming inherently makes a copy. As you pointed out elsewhere in the thread, it would be perfectly legal (but completely impractical) to cut up a VHS tape into individual scenes and resell those pieces of tape, since no copy was made.
If we're being pedantic about a few stray electrons, you also make a copy when you stream it from the disc to your CPU, from your CPU back to a monitor, and so on. If VidAngel had a minimum "purchase" time of 1yr the case probably would have swung the other way. The issue isn't the streaming, but rather that the nature of the agreement was more akin to making a copy than not (with "sales" happening substantially faster than they would have in meat space).
I think a reasonable person would see that what you describe is an attempt to make an end run around both the spirit and letter of the law. But what VidAngel was doing was "one copy = one view", which is IMO entirely reasonable. There is zero moral difference between mailing someone a Bluray disc (with instructions -- either automated or manual -- of what parts to skip) vs. keeping that disc in a warehouse and streaming the (censored) contents to exactly one person at a time.
But I wonder what would happen if we had some super-fast rocket drone delivery service so it's just a video rental shop on steroids?
Of course this may be abuse of the fair use backup copy, but when talking digital, we are anyways inventing philosophies.
Other way could be the backup could be entitled to "one last rental" to recoup last 4 bucks or so. I think that would be fair use but others may not.
You can backup software[1][2] (allowed by law, not fair use) but not movies.
[1] https://www.southerncaliforniapatents.com/articles/2014/10/0...
Also, how do you feel about libraries rebinding their books to fix/prevent the books from wearing out?
Streaming is making a copy of the contents, which, if done without a license, usually violates the content owner’s copyright.
"In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:[8]
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; the nature of the copyrighted work; the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. "
My point is just that if you think it's a good idea to extend first sale doctrine to digital files without any restrictions you may first want to consider the logical consequences of that.
I fully understand, but there's got to be a better way to describe this line in the sand given that DVDs contain digital files. "Physical" doesn't work because networks have a physical layer. "Stream" is also problematic because bitstreams are present on any kind of media. Even "network" doesn't quite cut the mustard because a chain of video stores could be described as a trade network. "Tangible" comes damn close, but suppose the baud rate is slow enough and the voltage high enough that I can discern the download by touching the wire? What, then, is the unambiguous word for what we're talking about here?
If it really boils down to letting time elapse between views/customers, shouldn't that be what the law demands?
I see that what you're saying is that User X could watch the first 10 seconds and then the second 10 seconds while you start you're first 10 seconds but that would be sort of a ridiculous use case for the following reasons:
1. your system would include a bunch of extra work for your solution to make this work, easier and cheaper to buy 10,000 copies of the movie and stream as needed.
2. people pause movies thus your solution becomes even more expensive because it would need to calculate out who has paused their ten seconds at the 5 second mark etc. etc.
Thus it seems likely that any solution being built on the model of we have physical copy we stream you copy will be built with showing complete movie and not any clever cutting up of movie to make the number of physical copies we have stretch further. The way the law works each different use case - cutting up movie, showing complete movie - would probably be challenged and there is no reason to suppose that they would all be allowed to pass, in fact since the showing complete movie was not allowed to pass in the real world it seems unlikely that the weird edge case cutting up movie would be allowed to pass even if law was changed to allow showing complete movie was changed.
WTV ran service called "Zediva" that streamed video from physical DVD players to customers. The District Court of Central California (the same court that ruled against VidAngel) decided that this violated the performance rights of the copyright holders.
Using EDL files to edit movies for my family is something I've actually done before. I think a superfluous sex scene is okay in most contexts, but when watching a movie with parents/grandparents it's generally too cringe for me and everybody else in the room. I used mpv's EDL functionality for this: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/DOCS/edl-mpv.r...
A friend of mine used to make family friendly edits of films just for his own kids when they were little.
Sometimes I try to make family friendly versions of otherwise vulgar jokes. It’s an interesting art form. Very niche.
I believe the only comment I've made about my take on humor is that anybody who laughs at TBBT must be under the influence of laughing gas. But you think this is because I have puritanical beliefs? Are you accusing me of that, or have I misread your comment? This earnestly is not clear to me.
The story is funnier because of stereotypes. That's the function mentioning the group serves. Taking a joke overly seriously and then having it explained to you is also a stereotype. It's just mildly humorous, and now it's slightly moreso.
Now if you object, replace the word Mormon with Skinhead regarding mentality of others not in the group, and maybe you’ll get the picture.
Source: non Mormon with about 10 years living in Zion (SLC)
In particular, you can't just write up your own legal fictions and expect them to be honored. It would seem the developers in the story above learned this lesson the hard way.
If the law really does say what VidAngel did is wrong, then the law is wrong and should be changed. I think it should be obvious to anyone who can read that the big media companies have (successfully) fought for decades to unfairly protect their bottom line, at the expense of everyone else. That's not ok; governments should not exist to protect crappy business models. Hell, there'd still be plenty of money to be made with much more lax copyright law.
If you wanna change that, find some other way to compensate artists first. They are the value creator. Attacking the bloated middlemen in the delivery chain doesn't remove the need for creators to eat. That is VidAngel's moral failure, as least going by the scenario as described: they weren't returning value to where it came from, instead tried to create a legal fiction to justify rent-seeking behaviour.
I, as a citizen and a consumer, want to know what rights I have when I purchase a product. The free market depends on perfect information when making purchasing decisions, and this is an area that is vague as all heck. If the rights the sellers of these movies claim I have matched the minimum guaranteed by law (or were even a super-set) then it would be clear. But they continue to claim I would get fewer rights than they are legally obligated to provide (technically playing it is a copyright violation according to their terms, never mind format shifting). They actually have it so ambiguous that it even seems anti-capitalistic.
Step one would probably be actually purchasing something instead of licensing it.
Sure, VidAngel could have built some custom software to play back a real Bluray disc, skipping certain scenes based on configuration file per title, and then would mail the disc to customers, who then have to mail it back, but that would be a worse experience for customers, and would be more wasteful (unnecessary physical shipping, as well as wear-and-tear on the discs). I guess the studios would actually see more money from this kind of scheme, since the discs would wear out and need to be replaced after a while.
But... the world we live in where this sort of thing isn't allowed... is stupid. Calling this a "performance" is just a legal gambit to unreasonably restrict what people (or companies, even) can do with things they've bought and own.
The $20 "purchase" and $19 "buy-back" is creative, but it should also be fine to just charge an all-you-can-watch subscription fee, as long as they don't allow concurrent viewing at greater than the number of Bluray discs they've purchased. "Performance", my ass. Fucking copyright cartels.
It does raise an interesting question for me though: is Hollywood losing out on profits by not offering censored versions of their content? Clearly there’s some demand. People like to make arguments about artistic integrity, but they have no problem censoring content to air on network tv.