Congress getting ready to legalize ClearPlay
The Hollywood studios don't much like it at all, but Congress is finally going to bat for the right of consumers to enjoy movies they way they want to. It just happens to be in protection of censorware programs like ClearPlay that automatically edit out anything that could conceivably make a movie family unfriendly. Anyway, to protect your right to remove the topless scene from Titanic, the House is about to pass the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005, a bill which the Senate already approved last month and is expected to easily score a presidential signature. The bill would make it explicitly clear that it is not a violation of copyright law to alter somebody's work without permission, as long as it's for private use only and these altered copies of the work are not redistributed in anyway. We actually sort of agree with this one—people should be allowed to do what they want with the DVDs they buy (just like it's perfectly legal for someone to black out all the naughty parts of books)—but hopefully just to piss off Congress someone'll figure out a way to add a little extra sex, violence, and profanity to movies.
