The Big [Censored] Theory

We have this kind of censorship in India as well, even the in weirdly innocous places. In James Bond movies, and I think Gone Girl as well, scenes were by zooming into character's faces or just straight cuts.

This is probably the only reason I maintain a US iTunes accounts (used to have to buy gift cards from sketchy sites online to keep this going, but I recently discovered that my Indian Amex card works fine with a US address).

Also trivia for those who are wondering how cuts are made, at least for cinema content: all video and audio assets are usually sent to theatres in full, but there's an XML file called the CPL (composition playlist) that specifies which file is played from which to which frame / timestamp in what sequence. Pure cuts or audio censorship can be handled by just adding an entry to skip the relevant frames or timestamp, or by specifying a censor beep as the audio track for a particular time range.

https://cinepedia.com/packaging/composition/

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.

Ref: https://amazon.clearplay.com/

My Mormon neighbors tend to use VidAngel, which got in huge trouble with an absolutely hilarious payment model.

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.

What if they rented the customer the server that read and encoded the customer's copy of the Blu-ray on the fly and streamed it to them using bandwidth that was leased to the customer? Would that violate the studio's "performance" rights? What if the customer is in the same room as the server and loads the disk themselves?

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.

>I, as a citizen and a consumer, want to know what rights I have when I purchase a product.

Step one would probably be actually purchasing something instead of licensing it.