8 ms·

CleanFlicks

51 points by known 7y ago

markdown 7y ago
There's a service you can pay for right now that does this on the fly for Netflix and other streaming services. Edit 1: I just found this one: https://www.vidangel.com/ https://www.vidangel.com/ but that's not the one I saw originally. Must be quite a popular service if there are competing providers. Edit 2: It looks like vidangel got into trouble: https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/vidangel-jury-verdict-damages-1203245947/ https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/vidangel-jury-verdict-dama... Edit 3: Here's another service: https://clearplay.com/ https://clearplay.com/
- Animats 7y ago
  Vidangel got into trouble because they were a for-pay streaming service selling copyrighted content. Clearplay is just an add-on for Google Chrome which downloads edit lists. They also sell a DVD/BluRay player which uses their lists. I wonder what Clearplay found to censor in Disney's Toy Story 4, Aladdin, Paddington, and Frozen. From their privacy policy: "ClearPlay Inc. uses remarketing services to advertise on third party websites to you after you visited our Service."
  - pontifier 7y ago
    As someone very close to this story, the way they were doing it should have worked, but Disney writes the laws and owns the courts.
- bigwavedave 7y ago
  +1 for clearplay. My folks use it religiously (I don't mean it's literally because of religion, it's just an expression. But if I'm being honest, religion probably has to do with it) and I'm very grateful they do. My youngest siblings are adopted and have special needs, so while they're getting older and are really quite smart, they're extremely vulnerable to the influence of any media they consume, especially when they can't quite understand fiction vs nonfiction. Putting on clearplay 100% of the time when they watch a movie helps keep a lot of nasty surprises from doing so much damage.
  - riffraff 7y ago
    I could see myself using this often if it was a built-in feature in netflix/primevideo. Often I am trying to watch something of low importance on TV while kids are running in and out of the room and I'd rather not accidentally expose them to a pointlessly prolonged sex scene, which seem to be in every single tv show these days for no apparent plot reason.
sneak 7y ago
I would like to hear about the doublethink employed by the good mormon workers who compile these edit/skip timecode lists.
- dakom 7y ago
  I'd imagine it's along the same lines as good police officers who sift through all the photographs, video, and audio recordings that conflict with their moral compass.
- beatgammit 7y ago
  What do you mean? I screen stuff before allowing my children to watch all the time. My parents did the same and would sometimes skip scenes they knew were bad (e.g. a sex scene in an otherwise adolescent-friendly film). Nobody was forced to take the job. Everybody has different standards for what they want to allow into their home, and it makes sense for parents to be able to block certain content they feel is inappropriate.
Tade0 7y ago
I've spent the first years of my life in Kuwait and that's how stuff you would see on TV was edited there. It was actually pretty well done(at least from the perspective of a five year old). Oddly, Baywatch went mostly uncensored.
DeepYogurt 7y ago
I hate this bullshit
BjoernKW 7y ago
When I saw the title I hoped this to be about a particular kerning issue ... This is hypocritical at best. If you don't want sexual content or profanity in your media then either create your own content or pay for the creation of such content. Manipulating original content to suit your particular moral convictions not only truncates that content but also doesn't help with incentivising the production of original content you might rather want to see.
- ballenf 7y ago
  Are you against ad blockers too?
  - BjoernKW 7y ago
    Ads are a different topic. Anyway, ads aren't content themselves but a means for paying for that content, which in itself is completely legitimate. The reason why I'm not against using ad blockers is that the way ads often are used today poses security and privacy risks as well as performance problems.
    - kd5bjo 7y ago
      > ads aren't content themselves but a means for paying for that content I’ve seen plenty of ads that are creative, funny, and engaging in their own right. A lot of talented people lend their creativity to make these, and your statement feels reminiscent of people that say genres they don’t like aren’t actually music. It’s incredibly condescending to dismiss their work as “not content”.
      - BjoernKW 7y ago
        Then let me define it more precisely: Ads usually are not the content a user requested or wanted to see when accessing a particular media outlet. In a way, well-designed ads are similar to a well-designed checkout process in that respect: I can admire its beauty or simplicity but I wouldn’t visit a website solely because of it.
pjc50 7y ago
This is going to be controversial, but I would say this is the sort of thing HN would be in favour of if it wasn't Mormons doing it: - consumer-side voluntary filtering as an alternative to demanding censorship - elastic approach to copyright - technological solution to social problem that's also a neat hack ("customized DVD player with software running concurrently with the DVD playback to perform edits") It does raise the question of how OK it is for people to construct a bubble from which they remove entire classes of people (I'm betting that queerness is very heavily edited, even in its least explicit forms).
- golergka 7y ago
  > they remove entire classes of people They remove themselves, voluntarily. I have a problem with censorship by Twitter or Facebook because of their near-monopoly status on social media, but I have no problem if some small company serves their small target audience with censorhip that they choose themselves.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    So why couldn’t a company create a social network to serve their own small group of people?
  - pjc50 7y ago
    I meant "Mormons removing queer people from their media because they don't like the representation". For a more international version of this, see Eurovision and the refusal of various Arab countries to broadcast the Israeli entries at all - which led to said Arab countries being excluded from it for refusal to comply with the rules.
    - brobdingnagians 7y ago
      It's within the rights of the Arabs to not broadcast, and within the rights of Eurovision to not allow them to participate. Are you suggesting that we should force people to watch things they don't agree with? That isn't exactly what you said, but seems to suggest it. I agree that taking the movie, editing it, copying it, and selling it-- is and should be illegal. But other solutions like client side indices of what to skip or mute don't harm the producer and are not editing of the copyrighted material itself.
reallydontask 7y ago
Isn't this similar to what airlines used to do (maybe still do) when movies played on shared screens? If it's opt-in I don't see a massive problem with such a service per se. Tricky to gauge how to move your kids to regular stuff though
- mikekchar 7y ago
  Mainly its copyright infringement and also potentially infringement of the creator's moral rights if you do it without permission of the copyright holders and/or creator. The latter part is the most interesting to me. It says "You can't represent this as being my movie if you alter it in a way that I don't approve of". I certainly understand the desire to do it and I find it a bit of a shame that the company couldn't handle the agreements to do everything above board.
- scarface74 7y ago
  The airlines don’t do it. The company that owns the copyright creates edited versions for different venues.
  - reallydontask 7y ago
    thanks for that, I had assumed that it was the airlines but it makes sense that it's the copyright owners that do it.
FineTralfazz 7y ago
Growing up as a Mormon kid and seeing these DVDs around, I was always curious why it was legal, and none of the adults I asked had an answer, or even seemed to understand why it wouldn't be. It's funny to discover this article >10 years later and learn that the answer was "it's not."
dakom 7y ago
Sounds like a legitimate idea executed the wrong way. If there is a genuine need in the market for such a service, surely the studios would cooperate (ideally with the director) in order to produce a clean cut? Seems to me very similar to overdubbing with other languages. Definitely kills all the hard crafted work of sound design and nuance in actor's performance, something the director should be the authority on - but deals are worked out and films are distributed with language tracks because there's huge global markets and it's ultimately a business decision.
- winkeltripel 7y ago
  > surely the studios would cooperate There's are a lot of market needs not being met by the studios. A need has to be huge for them to care.
- beatgammit 7y ago
  Check out the VidAngel case where they tried to work with the studios to get a licensing agreement but were instead litigated against. They wanted to work with the studios, but they wouldn't, so they found a way that they thought was technically legal. There absolutely is a sizable market for this type of content, but content producers don't want to budge. I think there are a lot of great films that have content I don't want my children watching, and my choices are either to find an edited copy or not consume the content. The problem is that the copyright holder's position is that I'm free to consume other content, whereas my position is that I should be able to modify whatever content I purchase or pay to have access to. Personally, I don't think copyright owners should have any standing to force consumers to consume content in the way the producer intended, they should only be able to offer the content or not. As long as there copyright owner is compensated for each sale, I see no problem with adding value, such as by editing the content or adding to it, provided the modifications are enumerated.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jhanschoo 7y ago
Hi, almost all the comments are missing the reason why copyright was infringed. To be fair, the Wikipedia article does not make that clear, and the rhetoric on both sides of the lawsuit tries to frame it as an issue of editing content and preserving the artist's wishes, which is not. From a source article for the Wikipedia article (https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=4026743&itype=NGPSID https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=4026743&itype=NGPS...) > CleanFlicks is a distributor that produces copies of Hollywood blockbusters on DVD by burning a scrubbed version onto a blank disc. They made copies of substantial portions of film without changing their essential creative expression. Today we'd recognize it as clear-cut copyright infringement. On the other hand, as much as creatives and their publishers dislike it, the law is friendly toward those trying to subvert a work's creative expression; e.g. parody, remixes, etc. are protected by fair use. If, for example, CleanFlicks restricted its operations to selectively scrubbing bought VHS tapes (without making copies), there wouldn't be a case.
- beatgammit 7y ago
  What exactly is the difference between modifying copies produced by the manufacturer and creating new copies with unwanted content removed, provided the copyright holder still gets paid for each sale? Does it really matter that they automated the process?

51 points by known 7y ago

There's a service you can pay for right now that does this on the fly for Netflix and other streaming services. Edit 1: I just found this one: https://www.vidangel.com/ https://www.vidangel.com/ but that's not the one I saw originally. Must be quite a popular service if there are competing providers. Edit 2: It looks like vidangel got into trouble: https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/vidangel-jury-verdict-damages-1203245947/ https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/vidangel-jury-verdict-dama... Edit 3: Here's another service: https://clearplay.com/ https://clearplay.com/

Animats 7y ago
Vidangel got into trouble because they were a for-pay streaming service selling copyrighted content. Clearplay is just an add-on for Google Chrome which downloads edit lists. They also sell a DVD/BluRay player which uses their lists. I wonder what Clearplay found to censor in Disney's Toy Story 4, Aladdin, Paddington, and Frozen. From their privacy policy: "ClearPlay Inc. uses remarketing services to advertise on third party websites to you after you visited our Service."
- pontifier 7y ago
  As someone very close to this story, the way they were doing it should have worked, but Disney writes the laws and owns the courts.
bigwavedave 7y ago
+1 for clearplay. My folks use it religiously (I don't mean it's literally because of religion, it's just an expression. But if I'm being honest, religion probably has to do with it) and I'm very grateful they do. My youngest siblings are adopted and have special needs, so while they're getting older and are really quite smart, they're extremely vulnerable to the influence of any media they consume, especially when they can't quite understand fiction vs nonfiction. Putting on clearplay 100% of the time when they watch a movie helps keep a lot of nasty surprises from doing so much damage.
- riffraff 7y ago
  I could see myself using this often if it was a built-in feature in netflix/primevideo. Often I am trying to watch something of low importance on TV while kids are running in and out of the room and I'd rather not accidentally expose them to a pointlessly prolonged sex scene, which seem to be in every single tv show these days for no apparent plot reason.

sneak 7y ago

I would like to hear about the doublethink employed by the good mormon workers who compile these edit/skip timecode lists.

dakom 7y ago
I'd imagine it's along the same lines as good police officers who sift through all the photographs, video, and audio recordings that conflict with their moral compass.
beatgammit 7y ago
What do you mean? I screen stuff before allowing my children to watch all the time. My parents did the same and would sometimes skip scenes they knew were bad (e.g. a sex scene in an otherwise adolescent-friendly film). Nobody was forced to take the job. Everybody has different standards for what they want to allow into their home, and it makes sense for parents to be able to block certain content they feel is inappropriate.

Tade0 7y ago

I've spent the first years of my life in Kuwait and that's how stuff you would see on TV was edited there. It was actually pretty well done(at least from the perspective of a five year old). Oddly, Baywatch went mostly uncensored.

DeepYogurt 7y ago

I hate this bullshit

BjoernKW 7y ago

When I saw the title I hoped this to be about a particular kerning issue ... This is hypocritical at best. If you don't want sexual content or profanity in your media then either create your own content or pay for the creation of such content. Manipulating original content to suit your particular moral convictions not only truncates that content but also doesn't help with incentivising the production of original content you might rather want to see.

ballenf 7y ago
Are you against ad blockers too?
- BjoernKW 7y ago
  Ads are a different topic. Anyway, ads aren't content themselves but a means for paying for that content, which in itself is completely legitimate. The reason why I'm not against using ad blockers is that the way ads often are used today poses security and privacy risks as well as performance problems.
  - kd5bjo 7y ago
    > ads aren't content themselves but a means for paying for that content I’ve seen plenty of ads that are creative, funny, and engaging in their own right. A lot of talented people lend their creativity to make these, and your statement feels reminiscent of people that say genres they don’t like aren’t actually music. It’s incredibly condescending to dismiss their work as “not content”.
    - BjoernKW 7y ago
      Then let me define it more precisely: Ads usually are not the content a user requested or wanted to see when accessing a particular media outlet. In a way, well-designed ads are similar to a well-designed checkout process in that respect: I can admire its beauty or simplicity but I wouldn’t visit a website solely because of it.

pjc50 7y ago

This is going to be controversial, but I would say this is the sort of thing HN would be in favour of if it wasn't Mormons doing it: - consumer-side voluntary filtering as an alternative to demanding censorship - elastic approach to copyright - technological solution to social problem that's also a neat hack ("customized DVD player with software running concurrently with the DVD playback to perform edits") It does raise the question of how OK it is for people to construct a bubble from which they remove entire classes of people (I'm betting that queerness is very heavily edited, even in its least explicit forms).

golergka 7y ago
> they remove entire classes of people They remove themselves, voluntarily. I have a problem with censorship by Twitter or Facebook because of their near-monopoly status on social media, but I have no problem if some small company serves their small target audience with censorhip that they choose themselves.
- scarface74 7y ago
  So why couldn’t a company create a social network to serve their own small group of people?
- pjc50 7y ago
  I meant "Mormons removing queer people from their media because they don't like the representation". For a more international version of this, see Eurovision and the refusal of various Arab countries to broadcast the Israeli entries at all - which led to said Arab countries being excluded from it for refusal to comply with the rules.
  - brobdingnagians 7y ago
    It's within the rights of the Arabs to not broadcast, and within the rights of Eurovision to not allow them to participate. Are you suggesting that we should force people to watch things they don't agree with? That isn't exactly what you said, but seems to suggest it. I agree that taking the movie, editing it, copying it, and selling it-- is and should be illegal. But other solutions like client side indices of what to skip or mute don't harm the producer and are not editing of the copyrighted material itself.

reallydontask 7y ago

Isn't this similar to what airlines used to do (maybe still do) when movies played on shared screens? If it's opt-in I don't see a massive problem with such a service per se. Tricky to gauge how to move your kids to regular stuff though

mikekchar 7y ago
Mainly its copyright infringement and also potentially infringement of the creator's moral rights if you do it without permission of the copyright holders and/or creator. The latter part is the most interesting to me. It says "You can't represent this as being my movie if you alter it in a way that I don't approve of". I certainly understand the desire to do it and I find it a bit of a shame that the company couldn't handle the agreements to do everything above board.
scarface74 7y ago
The airlines don’t do it. The company that owns the copyright creates edited versions for different venues.
- reallydontask 7y ago
  thanks for that, I had assumed that it was the airlines but it makes sense that it's the copyright owners that do it.

FineTralfazz 7y ago

Growing up as a Mormon kid and seeing these DVDs around, I was always curious why it was legal, and none of the adults I asked had an answer, or even seemed to understand why it wouldn't be. It's funny to discover this article >10 years later and learn that the answer was "it's not."

dakom 7y ago

Sounds like a legitimate idea executed the wrong way. If there is a genuine need in the market for such a service, surely the studios would cooperate (ideally with the director) in order to produce a clean cut? Seems to me very similar to overdubbing with other languages. Definitely kills all the hard crafted work of sound design and nuance in actor's performance, something the director should be the authority on - but deals are worked out and films are distributed with language tracks because there's huge global markets and it's ultimately a business decision.

winkeltripel 7y ago
> surely the studios would cooperate There's are a lot of market needs not being met by the studios. A need has to be huge for them to care.
beatgammit 7y ago
Check out the VidAngel case where they tried to work with the studios to get a licensing agreement but were instead litigated against. They wanted to work with the studios, but they wouldn't, so they found a way that they thought was technically legal. There absolutely is a sizable market for this type of content, but content producers don't want to budge. I think there are a lot of great films that have content I don't want my children watching, and my choices are either to find an edited copy or not consume the content. The problem is that the copyright holder's position is that I'm free to consume other content, whereas my position is that I should be able to modify whatever content I purchase or pay to have access to. Personally, I don't think copyright owners should have any standing to force consumers to consume content in the way the producer intended, they should only be able to offer the content or not. As long as there copyright owner is compensated for each sale, I see no problem with adding value, such as by editing the content or adding to it, provided the modifications are enumerated.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jhanschoo 7y ago

Hi, almost all the comments are missing the reason why copyright was infringed. To be fair, the Wikipedia article does not make that clear, and the rhetoric on both sides of the lawsuit tries to frame it as an issue of editing content and preserving the artist's wishes, which is not. From a source article for the Wikipedia article (https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=4026743&itype=NGPSID https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=4026743&itype=NGPS...) > CleanFlicks is a distributor that produces copies of Hollywood blockbusters on DVD by burning a scrubbed version onto a blank disc. They made copies of substantial portions of film without changing their essential creative expression. Today we'd recognize it as clear-cut copyright infringement. On the other hand, as much as creatives and their publishers dislike it, the law is friendly toward those trying to subvert a work's creative expression; e.g. parody, remixes, etc. are protected by fair use. If, for example, CleanFlicks restricted its operations to selectively scrubbing bought VHS tapes (without making copies), there wouldn't be a case.

beatgammit 7y ago
What exactly is the difference between modifying copies produced by the manufacturer and creating new copies with unwanted content removed, provided the copyright holder still gets paid for each sale? Does it really matter that they automated the process?