Family Movie Act on the move
The Family Movie Act, which is part of S. 167, the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act that was introduced in Congress earlier this year, appears to have some momentum. The Act would legalize the ClearPlay technology that enables families to watch movies without the profanity, nudity and other aspects not consistent with “family values.” The technology is currently the subject of litigation, Huntsman v. Soderbergh, with the motion picture studios and the Directors Guild of America.
The bill would exempt home skipping of movie content from trademark or copyright infringement, as well as the computer programs that enable this. The Register of Copyrights has testified before Congress that in order to have an infringing derivative work, a fixed copy of the edited version must be created, whereas in the case of ClearPlay the edited version is not fixed but instead is merely performed for the home viewer by controls programmed to automatically skip play-back of offending portions of a movie.
The bill almost passed last term, but it got caught up with a dispute over whether boxing regulation should be federalized. The bill has passed the Senate and gone on to the House, where last week it was reported out of committee and referred to the Union Calendar or Committee of the Whole, which means that the entire House is reviewing the bill through an expedited process.
The House Report on the bill includes a “minority view” by Representative Howard Berman of California. He complains that the bill takes sides in the ClearPlay dispute, and that private negotiations should be allowed to resolve the matter. He does provide a nice summary of the status of these negotiations for anyone interested in the case. Hollywood had offered to license ClearPlay the sanitized airplane or television versions of its films, but resisted granting ClearPlay permission to create its own sanitized versions.
S. 167 also includes provisions that would criminalize unauthorized in-theatre video-recording of movies, re-authorize the National Film Preservation Foundation, and create an exemption from infringement for libraries and archives for so-called “orphaned” works.
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