One of the things that it seems most of my friends are united on is the expansion of what is generally considered "fair use" of copyrighted material. Though I agree with them more often than not, I often find myself taking a contrarian view because I find the self-righteousness of their view to be a little-bit offsetting. Their view of "fair use" is broad enough that if it were widely implemented I believe it could do more harm than even the current tragic copyright regime.

So I've been a bit surprised to see many of these same people suddenly find one area in which they support curtailing fair use: censorship. Not censoring what anyone else watches, mind you, but censoring what their families watch. I find this a bit perplexing in a couple of ways. First, these leave-me-alone folks are suddenly concerned with how other people watch movies. Second, they are lining up against the consumer to do what they want to the movies that they purchase!

The case and point is a recent court ruling that put an injunction against a Utah-based company that scrubs dirty movies, taking out the objectionable material. There's no piracy going on as the customers send in one copy of the video and get back one copy of the video, albeit with some parts missing. This doesn't affect anyone except the consumer and the company providing them a service -- the movie tha tthe rest of us see is the same.

Though I don't know Pete's views on "fair use" at large, I find his views on the matter indicative of a lot of liberal-minded media consumers:

You don't get it both ways, guys: if the movies presented as are aren't to your liking, make your own. You don't get to alter a director's work without his approval. I realize our "human laws" don't hold up against the teachings of Jesus (or Joseph Smith, whoever), so maybe you ask him to pay your legal fees.

I consider this view to be quite peculiar. By this reasoning, when you purchase a movie you are only entitled to see the movie as the original producers intended it. Theoretically, that means that the last time I fastwarded through some less interesting scenes in Spiderman, I was infringing on their artistic vision and copyright because I was watching a movie in a way other than how it was intended. The answer, according to Pete's logic, is that I should make my own. More often, the answer I see is to not get movies that you dislike any particular part of.

This from the side that normally promotes cultural freedom.

Obviously, I disagree. If someone wants to edit Jar-Jar Binks out of Star Wars Episode 1, they have no right to do so. Either they accept Jar-Jar or they reject the entire movie. The same applies to someone that wants to put Memento in chronological order.

I will grant that there is an extra fold to all of this: These people are not cleaning up their own movies (as someone inside Pete's comment section advocates the right to do), they are cleaning up someone else's as a service. I can sort of understand a distinction here. And if someone wants to make that argument, I may disagree but I will understand it. Instead, however, the argument is that they shouldn't want to and therefore should not be allowed to. It usually involves the sort of personal ridicule sprinkled throughout Pete's post. Their opposition to this fair use seems at least partially rooted in animosity towards those that would take advantage of it.

And... to be honest... I agree with the first part of that rationale: they shouldn't want to. Replacing curse words with bleeps and "Motherfalcon!"s detracts from the movie even in cases where the curseword was needless to begin with. A family that has reasonable priorities should almost immediately see bigger and more important battles to fight than this and any that doesn't has bigger problems, in my view.

But this invites all sorts of producer-rights that I am extremely uncomfortale with. It gives movie studios further justification to apply more copy protection since they have one more "evil" to fight off. And besides slippery-slope arguments, I think that someone that wants their movie scrubbed should have the right to do that, even if I question the wisdom of doing so. At the retail level it could prevent or make more difficult for people to get the particular artistic work as the artist intended. In this case, the cheaper and easier version is precisely what the producers intended.

It's nigh impossible to argue that the customer was in any way denied the opportunity to consume the artists' original intent if they have to go to the trouble of sending it away to get it altered.

Nick Gillespie makes a better case than I do on the subject:

As a writer, I can sympathize with Apted's sense of creative ownership and his fear of losing control of his work. (Let's leave aside for the moment the legendary compromises all movie directors make on virtually every picture; and let's even leave aside whether that sort of often overbearing editorial oversight is a bad thing, though the short answer is that it sometimes is the only thing keeping a self-indulgent artist from producing total crap and losing his audience).

"These films carry our name and reflect our reputations," continued Apted. "So we have great passion about protecting our work...against unauthorized editing."

But here's the rub. There is only unauthorized editing whenever a piece of culture is put in front of an audience. The individuals watching in the darkened theater, the family room, or on a computer screen are constantly making choices, skipping over stuff, misinterpreting things, and more. The audience, alas, has a mind of its own, and that mind doesn't care about the creator's intentions.