Have you ever had a friend give you a review that included something like, “…except for this one scene that really didn’t need to be there…” or, “It would have been better without so much….” I know I have. I’ve also given reviews like that.

When my brothers tried to watch and edit Austin Powers for my parents, they spent the entire time with their hand on the remote, ready to fast forward or mute anything my parents would find objectionable. They didn’t do a very good job, because they didn’t know exactly what to skip or when to stop skipping. One solution to this is to make your own edited version of the movie, or to join a video store that has edited versions of movies for rent. The effort required to make your own edited version of a movie likely exceeds the value you would get from having an edited version. There are also many problems with renting an edited version. One problem is that the decision about what is kept and what is cut is left up to those who did the edits. Another problem is that the copyright owners do not like it when people make their own version of a copyrighted work.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to tell your DVD player what types of content you find objectionable and have the player automatically skip or mute the parts of the movie that contain that type of content? This type of solution wouldn’t modify the copyrighted work in any way, it would simply simulate my brothers skipping and muting the things that would upset my parents. This solution would allow the viewer to select the types of content to be skipped. If you didn’t want to see any violent scenes, you could choose to skip them. If you don’t mind seeing drug use, you don’t have to skip scenes with drug use. You would think this type of technology would be built in to every DVD player and that every DVD would contain markers for the DVD player to be able to do this kind of dynamic filtering. This type of solution would certainly cause an increase in DVD sales and rentals, because people that didn’t want to watch some movie because it had too much offensive content would now be able to buy or rent that movie and watch it without seeing any of the content that bothers them. You would think Hollywood and the MPAA would love this solution. You would think they would be the ones driving this technology forward.

You would be wrong.

In September 2002, eight Hollywood movie studios, the Directors Guild of America, and thirteen individual movie directors decided to file a federal lawsuit to stop this type of technology from being produced. They claimed that ClearPlay was in violation of the Copyright Act for providing a way for viewers to automatically skip or mute the volume to block content from movies shown in private homes. They have an agenda. They have already been successful in advancing their agenda with things like the Sony Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (aka The Mickey Mouse Protection Act) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But the pendulum may finally start swinging in the right direction again.

The Family Movie Act was passed as part of The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act on April 19, 2005. It clarifies the Copyright Act to guarantee the legality of technologies that filter unwanted content from movies shown in private settings. It means the lawsuit against ClearPlay is all but dismissed.

It means we can still watch the movies we paid for, the way we want to see them.

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