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A couple of weeks ago, I watched a DVD supposedly based
on one of my favorite Victorian novels, Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray. The movie ends with Becky
Sharp and Joseph Sedley, obviously enamored with each
other, merrily riding atop an elephant through a vibrant
celebration in India. The book ends with Joseph dead after
Becky poisons him for his life insurance.
To say the least, Thackeray's artistic vision
was
compromised by film director Mira Nair and the scores of
other people involved in its production. He wrote a witty
and satirical attack on a gilded superficial society, where
you cheer for scheming Becky because she ruins people who
have it coming, and they turned it into a fluffy costume
romance.
Productions like Vanity Fair are why I had a hard time keeping a straight face when I read about a court ruling handed down earlier this month by federal Judge Richard Matsch in Denver.
At issue were several video-sanitizing services, mostly based in Utah, with names like CleanFlix and Play It Clean. They purchase an official DVD. They make an edited copy, eliminating profanity, nudity, gore and other stuff they deem unsuitable. If you buy or rent from one of these companies, you get both versions.
So there isn't any financial damage to the studios; indeed they might even sell more DVDs on account of these services. The people who buy or rent these DVDs know what they're getting and why. There's no deception involved. And there's no First Amendment censorship issue, either, since the editing is done by private parties, not the government.
Even so, the sanitizers were sued for copyright infringement in December, 2002, by various Hollywood studios and directors, as well as the Directors Guild of America.
Hollywood won. Matsch held that the sanitizers'
business is illegitimate. The right to control the
content of the copyrighted work ... is the essence of the
law of copyright.
Let me be clear that I think sanitizing is silly, and I
like my indulgences served neat: unfiltered home-rolls,
straight rye, rare steak, bash-shell Linux, black coffee,
loud and dirty rock 'n roll, etc. We had several volumes of
Shakespeare around when we had small children at home, but
we never felt the need to purchase an 1818 work from Thomas
Bowdler, who issued the Family Shakespeare,
wherein
nothing is added to the original text, but those words
and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be
read aloud in a family.
But I also believe I have the right to watch as much or as little of a movie as suits me, and other people have that same right. If they want to exercise it in a puerile way, that's their problem.
And where does this creative control
end? Thanks
to the lobbyists of Hollywood, it is illegal for me to play
a DVD that I own on a computer I own. They rig the DVDs so
that you can't skip their promotional tracks -- just how is
that part of an artistic vision
?
Do you violate copyright law by going to the restroom during the playback, because you're missing part of what the director wanted you to see? If you pause it for that duration, are you violating copyright because you're interrupting the continuous flow that the director desired? If you display it on a 20-inch CRT instead of a 48-inch plasma screen, and thereby miss certain visual details that the director wanted you to see, are you violating copyright? Is it a violation if you run the sound through your tinny TV speaker instead of the director's desired Dolby 7.1 audio system?
That day may be coming, thanks to rulings like this one.
It was cheered by Michael Apted, president of the Directors
Guild of America. We have great passion about protecting
our work, which is our signature and brand
identification.
I'd take him a lot more seriously if Hollywood had shown
some respect for William Thackeray's signature and brand
identification
when his Vanity Fair was made into a
movie in 2004. But Thackeray died in 1863, his works have
gone into the public domain, and there's no one to protect
his artistic vision from money-grubbing hacks who expect us
to respect their artistic visions.
Hollywood has repeatedly altered works by Jane Austen
and Mark Twain and scores of other great writers whose work
now belongs to the public, as in public domain.
So
perhaps we, the public, ought to sue Hollywood for
misrepresenting those artistic visions for its own selfish
purposes.
But I don't believe in controlling art, even if Hollywood does.
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