A breakthrough in co…

A breakthrough in consumer choice.

Wal-Mart is selling the world’s first DVD player that can seamlessly skip over violence, swearing, nudity and other potentially offensive movie content. The $79 unit features technology by ClearPlay and is manufactured by Thomson Inc. under its RCA brand.

Does ClearPlay force this on the consumer?

ClearPlay offers several settings in four categories of filtering — violence, language, sex/nudity and explicit drug use — with the user able to choose any combination. For example, the language setting can range from irreligious exclamations to ethnic slurs to graphic phrases used as profanity.

[ClearPlay CEO Bill] Aho said the product is important, because standards differ from one person to another. Some people have no objection to innuendo, he said, but shield their children from seeing violence. He added that it’s consumer choice, not censorship.

You can edit as much or as little as you like, or see the whole thing. But who’s against it?

RCA’s player is the latest development in a legal battle between the Salt Lake City-based software company and Hollywood. Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Steven Soderbergh and other members of the Directors Guild of America (DGA) filed suit against ClearPlay in September 2002, when the filtering product was available as a computer program.

Those legal proceedings are still under way in Colorado’s 10th District Court. Both sides currently are waiting for a ruling on a summary judgment filed by ClearPlay.

The DGA, for its part, is sticking to its guns.

“ClearPlay software edits movies to conform to ClearPlay’s vision of a movie instead of letting audiences see, and judge for themselves, what writers wrote, what actors said and what directors envisioned,” a DGA spokesman said in a statement Monday. “Ultimately, it is a violation of law and just wrong to profit from selling software that changes the intent of movies you didn’t create and don’t own.”

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, when you press the “skip ahead” button on your DVD, you’re violating the law. And ClearPlay doesn’t edit to conform to ClearPlay’s vision of a movie, it edits to conform to the user’s choices.

Aho said the product is important, because standards differ from one person to another. Some people have no objection to innuendo, he said, but shield their children from seeing violence. He added that it’s consumer choice, not censorship.

Seems clear enough. The movie on the DVD is not changed, but the player allows the viewer to decide how they want to see it. Isn’t that my choice?

(I wonder how many of these guys so up in arms about this are “pro-choice” when it comes to killing unborn children. Just asking.)

He added that ClearPlay will not offer titles that cannot be edited in a way that retains their sensibility, such as “Saving Private Ryan,” “Schindler’s List” or “The Passion of the Christ.”

So this really isn’t that much of an imposition. If removing the violence removes the story, there’s no editing, and the consumer can just choose not to buy the movie.

Why is this an issue?

Filed under: Uncategorized

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!