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.

Leaving aside the matter of Mormons and their weird puritan sensibilities, what this company essentially did was reinvent movie rental, but because they did it on the internet instead of a brick and mortar shop we're all expected to think it obvious and self evidence that what they did was horrible.

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.

Taken to it's logical extreme though, such a service could easily render copyright effectively useless. Break the movie into 10 second clips, "rent out" each of those clips during the 10 seconds they're being viewed and automatically return them after. There, you can now "legally" stream 720 concurrent copies of a 2 hour movie at once in perpetuity for near zero marginal cost.

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.

A 10 second clip of a movie that is designed to be stitched with 710 other 10 second clips isn't fair use, it's just copyright infringement.

"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. "

We're talking about first sale doctrine here, not fair use. If I did the exact same thing with a VHS tape, cutting out 10 second strips of tape and renting them out to people, that'd be totally legal under first sale doctrine. Doing that with VHS would be totally impractical but legal. Doing it with a digital file would be totally practical but illegal, since currently first sale doctrine doesn't apply to digital distribution of copyrighted materials.

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.