Ronald Coleman at Likelihood of Confusion has published some thoughts on the ClearPlay System. For those of you who don’t follow the geekly arts, ClearPlay is a hardware solution that allows you to filter out some of the gratuitous dreck that Hollywood inserts into its product.
Currently in its early stages, ClearPlay can clean up slightly over 100 movies at this time. Go to your favorite place to buy or rent a DVD, bring it home, insert it into a ClearPlay equipped DVD player, and you can watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High without the sex, nudity, bad language and violence. (Although the movie will only be 10 minutes long and make absolutely no sense.)
Hollywood and its infinite cadre of lawyers don’t like this technology, and are trying everything they can to stifle it before it does terrible damage to the artistic integrity of the director’s art. (Ack. Just writing that makes me feel like I need a shower.)
The conflict of rights here is interesting, since you are buying or renting a standard DVD, unedited in any way. Your purchased DVD player is doing the editing, in real time, on your behalf. Of course, according to Hollywood, this is a bad thing.
However, you must remember that this line of reasoning is brought to you by the folks who tried to tell us that we were bad people for taping TV shows (remember the Sony decision?), tried to make it illegal to fast forward through commercialsand wantedveto control of what you could and could not do with every digital capable device in your home.
Enough of me–go read Sewage Treatment.