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.

Even during the video rental days you weren't allowed to just go out and purchase a bunch of videos at Walmart and start renting them out, you need to have purchased the rights to rent out the video.

You are completely wrong. There's no such thing as "right to rent video." You could 100% buy a bunch of videos and start renting them out today, and it would be completely legal. Netflix does this today for their DVD rental business. This is also why libraries are legal.

You can't buy a DVD and charge tickets to see the DVD played by you. You can't stream the DVD's contents over the Internet. But you can absolutely rent the DVD itself.

In the current age of gigabit FTTH connections, I wonder how the situation would be if the service provider would just allow you to rent a dvd drive in a datacenter that's connected via regular sata, just tunneled through the internet.

That'd avoid all the "breaking the DRM", "modifying the data", etc.

As provider you just offer a device that loads dvds from a user's in-datacenter storage cabinet into their in-datacenter dvd drives, and rent them a dvd drive.

That might be complicated enough to avoid the whole "performance" interpretation

Another comment [0] pointed out that a version of this was already tried, and it was found to still be a public performance. Not sure how much the details of the technologies used would affect the ruling, but probably not enough.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32645286