Score One for Hollywood (Redux)

Following up on my earlier post, here's a discussion of the "CleanFlix" case from Utah by FindLaw's Marci Hamilton. She makes a good point about the strength of the DVD cleaner uppers' arguments:

The clarity of the law in this case forces me to ask how three companies could believe that such a business plan was legal, or likely to be successful. Did they not consult attorneys before sinking their lives (and perhaps their fortunes) into these businesses? Surely, they must have. So they must have known they were skating on very thin legal ice. Why did they go ahead anyway?

Her answer:

In contemporary America, entities and individuals motivated by religious or moral faith have come to believe that the law should not apply to them when it conflicts with their particular interests and world view.

Pretty strong allegation. She doesn't really present any evidence to back it up, but it seems right to me.

The judge's opinion can be found here. Among the points made:

The counterclaim defendants contend that there is no adverse effect from their use of the movies on the value of the copyrighted work to the Studios. They suggest that the Studios benefit because they are selling more copies of their movies as a result of the editing parties’ practice of maintaining a one to one ratio of the original and edited versions.* It is assumed that the consumers of the edited versions would not have themselves purchased the authorized versions because of the objectionable content and the Studios do not compete in this alternative market.

The argument has superficial appeal but it ignores the intrinsic value of the right to control the content of the copyrighted work which is the essence of the law of copyright. Whether these films should be edited in a manner that would make them acceptable to more of the public playing them on DVD in a home environment is more than merely a matter of marketing; it is a question of what audience the copyright owner wants to reach.

Emphasis mine. An excellent point. One imagines that Stephen Soderbergh (one of the plaintiffs) didn't intend Sex, Lies, & Videotape or Traffic to be viewed "by the whole family." Or even 9012Live, for that matter (I wouldn't subject my niece and nephews to Jon Anderson's early 80s fashion sense). If that's the case, why would anyone attempt to emasculate his work to make it more kid friendly? The world isn't kid friendly, in the first place!

The opinion also answers jedi jawa's question from the other post about DVD players that skip over the naughty bits:

During the pendency of this case Congress enacted the Family Movie Act of 2005, Pub. L. No. 1099, 119 Stat. 218, 223224, amending[17 U.S.C.] § 110 to provide an exemption for the editing of motion pictures by a member of a private household if no fixed copy of the altered version of the motion picture is created. That statute eliminated from this case those parties selling technologyenabling such private editing.

* The cleaner uppers required their customers to buy and send them a legit copy of the movie getting edited (although it's unclear quite how that works in a rental situation).