Return to Chronology 20 Sep 2002
So, what is wrong with personally removing that material you might find offensive from a film or renting a copy where it had been done for you?
The short answer is: it constitutes a copyright violation. The explication of that answer, however, could probably fill volumes.
Boiled down to its simplest, copyright literally means the right to copy a given work. Copyright is created automatically in conjunction with the work and is vested in the author or creator; or it can be transferred to that person's heirs or other assignees. As an adjunct to protecting one's copyright, one can register the work with a government office. This does not really confer any greater degree of protection, but if somebody uses your work and claims it as their own, you can not only stop them but demand heaps of cash in recompense if the work is registered. If it's not registered then you can only get them to stop.
Most text, such as in books or articles, enjoys a rather loose application of copyright under a provision known as fair use. Fair use allows the copying of portions of the material for educational use or for review or even for quoting by a character in one's own writing. However, there is no hard and fast limit as to how much material constitutes fair use and how much crosses the line into copyright violation.
One fine example of that is the quotations files on this site. My major concern over the mass of material that I have culled from any individual book is whether or not I have taken too much. I believe that concern is mitigated by properly attributing the material to its author, book, and page number, and the fact that all the material pertains (albeit rather obliquely in many cases) to the theme of human rights. Further, the material is made available to any person who might wish to study it without charging any fee. The authors of those works might well disagree with me, however, and demand that I remove their material. If I want to get bullheaded about it, I can insist they sue and let a judge settle the matter.
Another fine example is the way many songwriters will absolutely freak right out and sue someone for using a small scrap of their song lyrics in any context without their permission.
The hoorah in the FamilyFlix and cleancutcinemas.com lawsuit stems, as I see it, from their using material created by others, without the permission of those creators, to produce derivative works containing material well in excess of what could be considered fair use. Plus, they're attributing the derivative works to the original creators does not constitute a mitigating factor. Quite frankly, I believe it constitutes misrepresentation.
In fact, there is no way the fair use argument could possibly be applied in this case. The companies cutting "offensive" material from the films are not attempting to create works with any kind of original material, and while I cannot fault them for engaging in some kind of pretense in that regard, I certainly can and do fault them for pretending that the result is the film it is purported to be. To be fair, this state of affairs seems to arise from simple ignorance. Copyright can be exceedingly convo luted and complex, and people almost invariably assume that in buying a copy of a work, whether a sample of software or a film on DVD, they are also buying some kind of carte blanche-right to pass off free copies to their friends under the assumption of ownership. Which is certainly the case here as some of the defendants have made that approximate statement in interviews. In fact, under Canadian Copyright Law, possession of a work grants only limited ownership. I believe the same is true of U.S Copyright Law. And none of the companies cutting the films are doing so with the permission of the copyright holders.
Harkening back to these films being misrepresentations, this belief stems from the philosophical rather than the legalistic. When an artist creates a work, regardless of the medium or mode of expression, he does so according to a vision. Consider the change in the quality of Star Trek: The Next Generation after the death of Gene Roddenberry. Up until his death, ST:TNG focused primarily on examination of "the Human Equation" and the full scope of human interactions from the viewpoints of psychology, sociology, and the other social sciences. Once he died, the focus shifted ever increasingly away from speculative fiction toward action/adventure shoot-'em-ups, and even the efforts at speculative fiction fell short of what they could have been. Deep Space Nine finally became a sleazy sex show cum soap opera, and I gave up watching Voyager altogether because it was just dull. Neither of them had ever really conformed to Gene's vision anyway.
The upshot of it is, by tampering with the content of the films, FamilyFlix and cleancutcinemas.com also tamper with the artistry of the pieces they are cutting, and the resultant bowdlerization is not the work created by the artist, however much it might resemble that work.
I have no doubt, gentle reader, that you are still scratching your head wondering what all the fuss is about. Unless you are yourself an artist, you almost certainly have no frame of reference upon which to hang this issue. Perhaps it will help to think of the cutting as the work of spray-painting vandals. If you own a building and some jumped-up, arrogant, adolescent twit comes along and scribbles his handle on the side of it in neon colors, he has defaced your property. Oh, in his mind he has "improved" it, but as the owner you're the one who has to get the wall sand-blasted clean.
So it is with "improving" films one finds offensive.
And which raises another question and brings the point around to censorship. Why do these dolts insist on watching such films? If Saving Private Ryan is too graphic (and it is extremely graphic as I can attest from having seen the opening few minutes on the boob tube), why insist on a version that does not offend your hypersensitivity when you can select to just not see the film? I didn't watch Private Ryan at all. Even after the invading forces had landed and the literal bloodbath had ended. Although that was mostly because The Green Mile was showing on another channel and then Andromeda came on. (Actually, my daughter kept flipping back and forth from Green Mile to Private Ryan until I finally told her stop. She wanted to study the issues of warfare and the stupidity of following orders to one's death.)
At any rate, the nice thing about a free country is that you are not required to watch "trash". Nor, believe it or not, do you have a right to demand that filmmakers crank out pabulum fit for your emotional pallet. Oh, you have a right to churn out pap at your own discretion, of course, just not to require that others do so. Nor to cheapen their efforts. If you don't want to accept the world for the way it is, then crawl off under some rock and stay there. Or start your own studio and pursue the art according to your vision.
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