This is really not a compelling issue, and I'm really not interested in hitching my wagon to a group of censors who alter movie content without the permission of the original artists. There is nothing in this ruling that prevents an artist from editing his own content and releasing a "sanitized" version of the work. What is objected to is people capitalizing on the artist's work in a manner that abuses copyright law. I would think this goes right to the heart of copyright law.

The idea that the "domain of cultural resources" is shrinking is laughable. Try perusing YouTube someday.

I was half inclined to treat this as a joke: Nathan posted this to convince us, after the debate here yesterday, that, see, there is a huge difference between labor unions and progressive politics.

But this isn't a rigid, "modern" version of copyright law, whatever that might mean. I await an actual argument that what Nathan advocates is not copyright violation, plain and simple. It is also the repression of art and ideas. Directors have long fought with studios, often resigned to a compromise. I can't believe, however, any are resigned to seeing the religious right's version of their films sold widely, competing with the original, and no doubt mistaken for their film. I doubt studios like the competition either.

Then again, I seem to remember some great novels that took far too long to appear in unexpurgated form. Guess they can't count on Nathan's support. Maybe when "The Smartest Guys in the Room" appears cleansed so as to defend corporations and the "right to work," he'll be happier.

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

On one level, of course this is nothing new. The word, Bowdlerize has been around for a very long time:  http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Bowdlerize and the word bleep is part of most of our vocabularies, and our aural environment is affected by it every day.  I think that there is a difference may have a strange and sinister significance because of different physical characteristics in the media involved and because of the nature of the free market. 

My example has nothing to do with politics, but maybe that's o.k. on a Sunday morning.  I use Laurel and Hardy in one of my classes to illustrate how moving pictures broadened the visual information of mainstream America before people traveled very much (all of a sudden Spanish tile roofs start to appear on bungalows in New England) and because I like Laurel and Hardy and don't want them to disappear from the cultural memory.  One of the films I use is the award winning short, The Music Box which some of you may remember.  "But Officer...he kicked me right in the middle of my daily duties".  Anyhow, when the video I was using deteriorated with age, the only version available for replacing it was the colorized version.  Now I was faced with a choice...stop showing the film, (our equipment isn't sophisticated enough to turn off color from the console--perhaps some is),  or try to give an explanation to the students and ask them to imagine the film in black and white and discount what they're seeing in terms of the color palette. 

The assumption of the commercial distributors was that nobody would want to watch the film in black and white, and free market economics made the original version unavailable.  What happens if the same phenomena happens with these expurgated films?  Twenty, thirty, forty years from now the originals may be unavailable to the general public, and the Bowdlerized (read Censored) version be the only one available.  What is worse, the vast majority of future viewers of these films may not know that any other version except the expurgated version exists.   

Clean fix is censorship, even if it is voluntary, commercially driven censorship.  John Milton, doughty Puritan poet that he was, would have hated it.  Bravo to the judges who struck this down.  The  only version of this kind of behavior I could support would be one which required the visual equivalent of the bleep on the screen... a message something of the equivalent "twenty seconds of this film were cut to protect your delicate eyes and ears from something we thing would be harmful to you"...maybe followed by a quote from Kant's What is Enlightenment.

Mike

All of this seems to be about everybody wants access to everything even though they have to change the thing itself in order to get the kind of access they want. We do it to our environment; we do it to our art; and we wind up destroying the very thing we admired by turning into a imitation, a duplicate, as opposed to something respected for its uniqueness. Must we always have everything on our own terms, without regard for the requirements of the healthy ecosystem, or intention of the author, or the temporality of the concept, or the force of nature, or the film director's vision? Copyright -- like environmental conservation -- is formalized sign of respect for the intentions and the integrity of the maker. We are very short-sighted and egocentric if we ignore that.

I won't argue about whether this ruling is good or bad, not enough coffee for that.

If I were CleanFix, I would distribute both the DVD of the film along with an "edit list" that my CleanFix Player could read and use to make on the fly edits when the consumer demanded.

That on the fly edit could either be viewed on a computer, or burned to a DVD by the consumer. That burning would surely be fair use.

It's not as large a market as selling the VHS or DVDs themselves, but it seems to accomplish the same thing without too much problem for the consumer.

This is sort of like the V-Chip. The main problem with the V-Chip is that it gave sole authority of ratings to one group of people.

What the V-Chip should have done was allow the consumer to indicate any one of an arbitrary number of ratings organizations to produce the rating for a movie.

That way Ned Flanders could use the Focus on the Family Feed, and I could use the ACLU feed, and the local school district could let their teachers create their own ratings feed.

I can't believe this. And I really can't believe that anyone who cares about art, about literature, about film would promote this kind of scam on the public. Artists, writers, filmmakers use images and words for a reason - to convey  their meaning and their vision of a subject.  No one else has the right to edit, change or diminish in any way, shape or form that vision or perception. 

Writers choose words purposefully- there is a reason why a character speaks in a certain way.  Artists choose subjects and paint them in a certain way to convey a mood or feeling or lesson.  Filmmakers choose to film certain scenes and edit a film for these same reasons.  You may not like the result, you may criticize, you may choose not to see it or read it (which then, of course revokes your privilege to criticize) but by God, NO ONE has the right to "clean it up" or "fix it" or in any way alter the artist's finished work. 

 If a "lot of families" don't like the content of a film or book or painting, then they can choose other films, or books or paintings that better suit their tastes or they can choose not to view or read subjects they find offensive.

 Instead of CleanFlix they should call it was it is - QuickFix.  Instead of educating people, of informing them, or teaching them, the quick and lazy way is to pander to the lowest common denominator and just remove the part "many families" don't like.  It's also lazier and easier than actually watching a film with your children and explaining it to them. 

 Let me put it this way - there are few things in your article I don't like - would it be okay with you, if I changed a few sentences, maybe left out a paragraph or two and then sent it to all the newspapers and newsmagazines?  You would get full credit as the author of course...

Agree with BevD. Clearly we are dealing with a work of art, whether or not you value it highly or like the content. Even in the absence of copyright laws, it would be unethical to tamper with it.

Homer
www.altara.blogspot.com.

YouTube is an interesting example -- large chunks of YouTube are illegal under current law and exist only until the copyright lawyers crack down.

As folks like Lessig document, the copyright burden on legally producing any documentary or piece of art is getting overwhelming, since copyrighted images and information permetate our culture, so almost nothing that can be produced doesn't recycle some copyrighted image, music or other protected item.

As to who controls the copyright, I don't see a serious argument in the idea that the sale of a copyright to a large corporation implies that we should take the concept of artistic purity less seriously.

Basically, the burden is on you in this instance to show why this court ruling is wrong, because the gut instinct is that the court is right. You are also asking progressives to throw their political support behind "family values" movie censors. These are exactly the people who nauseate me the most in politics.

It would? If I purchase the art from the creator (or the previous owner of the art), don't I have the right to do whatever I want with it?

To put it another way, Nathan or Clean Fix or anyone else is allowed to issue a newspaper or television news program with, say, all news hostile to the Bush administration removed. Come to think of it, it's already been done, and it's disgusting. What they can't do is rework the Times or, for that matter, my posts to that end while not asking if we'd like it without insulting the writer, distorting the writer's meaning, and breaking the law. Nor can they claim it is a faithful or perhaps purer version of the original.

This does not mean copyright stifles artistic creativity or, as Nathan chooses to put it, shrinks the domain of creative resources. The case of a film is no different in the slightest, and I see nothing about this that's in the least difficult to understand.

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

I think that copyright should be severely curtailed from the present over-inflated form. For example, Scientology prosecutes folks who commit heresy or blasfemy from their point of view by accusing them of copyright infringement. Estates of long dead writers prosecute researchers who want to draw inconvenient conclusion from the writers letters --- by forbidding quotations.

Consider Mona Lisa with a mustache or otherwise modified. Luckily, copyright of Leonardo has expired.

Copyright should not be used to stiffle heresy, inconvenient biographies, satire, political disagreement etc. Perhaps some compromise is possible -- e.g. extensive fair use provisions in effect 15 years after publication.

The ability of documentary filmmakers is severely limited by rights issues. It's nearly impossible to make a historical documentary without expensive legal advice.

I belong to several mailing lists for movie archivists, and this is one of the most discussed topics. Clearing rights for archival film and images for a documentary can be one of the biggest budget expenses.

I'm not for censorship in any way shape or form, but it's not censorship to offer an edited version for family viewing. Whether it's artistically palatable is another matter, but no one is forcing the edited versions on viewers.

The available pool of cultural resources is not necessarily shrinking, but with the expansion of copyright law and increasing use of technology to protect source material, it's becoming much more difficult to take advantage of.

I await an actual argument that what Nathan advocates is not copyright violation, plain and simple.

Cleanflix purchased each and every copy of the film they sell from the original owners. Now, we can argue what is fair use and what is not fair use when it comes to making copies, but here we're talking about NO COPIES BEING MADE AT ALL. The idea that I can violate your copyright without, well, COPYING what you've done is absurd.

Then again, I seem to remember some great novels that took far too long to appear in unexpurgated form.

I fail to see any connection between the idea of editing your own copy of a film and what you are saying there.

Maybe when "The Smartest Guys in the Room" appears cleansed so as to defend corporations and the "right to work," he'll be happier.

If Nathan is being consistent, then he would indeed have to support someone's right to purchase a copy of that film, edit it, and sell that single copy if it is labeled as such an edited copy. I would certainly support that right.

No, you don't. You have the responsibilty to protect it, care for it and keep it for others.

H. C. Berkowitz seems to be saying that his work has been used without his permission, and he's upset about it.

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I have a moral imperative to support freedom. I have a moral imperative to support the creation of new works inspired by old works. Our creations are independent of and bigger than we, the creators. We do not have the right to strange the children of our creations in the cradle--the remixes and remakes and edits that they inspire each make the world a more beautiful place. To attempt to stop the creation of those works is to not only make the world an inferior, uglier place, but is to commit an ethical violation.

I do absolutely no damage to the original artist's vision unless I falsely claim that my new edit is the original.

Next thing you know, they'll be editing out the Sermon on the Mount. Once you start editing for one purpose, inevitably in our polarized society, you edit for political content.

I learned a lesson when I was 12 when I defied the nuns and the local Catholic Church which though "To Kill a Mockingbird" unfit for teenage viewing. It's still one of my favorite movies and it taught me a great lesson: the majority is not always morally right.

The first time I published something, if just a local newspaper feature, was at the beginning of the sixties. My high school had a very strong art department, and I was able to do minors in visual art and dramatics. At the time, I seemed to do well in sculpture, although I've lost interest, but was in juried competition when I was 15 or so.

Most of my writing is nonfiction, which doesn't seem to engender the same emotionalism as in the visual arts. When I started routinely showing my work in photographic competition, and also participated a bit in the art gallery world, I found some fairly bizarre positions taken by artist. While the correlation wasn't absolute, the more someone insisted on their "right to make a statement", even if that blocked a street, the less classical talent that person had.

A good deal of my photography is abstract, or manipulative (e.g., hand coloring). My sketching is more representational, but I remain a fan of the test of a would-be avant-garde artist: could you sketch that lamp? Perhaps this cat? Even such that the product is not a generic cat, but that you can tell it's Tiger or Mr. Clark? It's surprising how many of the avant-garde just don't have basic technical skills. Part of the challenge of art, to me, is the skill: when I have the opportunity, I'll use my view camera, so utterly non-automatic that I put in individual sheets of film, so utterly non-automatic that I have complete control of the film selection and how individual sheets are developed.

Forgive me if I am rather cynical about a moral imperative to artistic expression, not codified in law. It's a rare artist that can be both creative and offensive. "Guernica" succeeds, "Piss Christ" does not.

You have the responsibilty to protect it, care for it and keep it for others.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

It is a moral imperative. Copyright laws in the arts are more than "fair use". It's about protecting the integrity of the work.

Copyright law is NOT about protecting the integricy of the work. Copyright law is about providing incentive to produce creative works. Go take a look at the constitution. There is nothing there about "protecting integrity".

If you want laws to protect the integrity of art, then you should lobby for those. But they would have nothing to do with copyright.

Yes, you have the right to buy artwork, whether it is film or any other media, but that does not mean you have the right to then mutilate the work and resell it as representative of that artist's work.

Nobody is asking to resell the work as "representative of the artist's work". Clearflix (or whatever they are called) is very clear about what they are selling: movies that have been modified to remove the parts some people don't want to see.

The artist has the right to protect his freedom of speech as much as anyone else.

Nobody is taking away the artist's freedom of speech. He made his movie. He sold it. Anyone can buy it. Nothing Clearflix does can change that.

Art isn't a free-for-all where everyone is entitled to add his opinion or idea or anything else and everyone else's opinion is equal to the artist's.

What Art Is or Isn't is irrelevant to this argument. If you want to ban Clearflix from your artist club, go right ahead. Just don't start taking away their rights because you don't agree with them.

No one has the "right" to mutilate, change or destroy someone else's work because "many families don't like it."

Why don't they have that right? You seem to have invented a Right To Be An Artist that grants special, extra-constitutional rights. They don't appear in the constitution anywhere, nor are they supported by common law. On top of that, they are demonstrably bad for the arts themselves, as Lessig makes very clear.

Art is protected because it is meaningful, it is extraordinary, it is the reflection of the value that a society puts on freedom of expression. It is important to the artist and it is important to civilization that it be protected from the iconoclasts and public censors.

It is important to protect the right to create. But you are trying to ban the right to create.

he has the responsibility to learn discernment and taste and critical thinking and to protect good work from mutilation or destruction. We all have rights, but we also have responsibilities and duties.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Actually, if someone buys the rights to Picasso's paintings, then copyright law says they're in the clear to do with them as they please. Clearly, what you're talking about isn't what the law is meant to defend.

And I do agree that if you claim your work is the work of the original artist then that's slanderous. Slander has nothing to do with copyright, and this ruling goes way further than justice allows.

Your final paragraph is simply the opposite of the truth. The work is larger than the artist. If the artist never wants his beautiful work to be sullied by the audience's insight, then he should have kept it to himself. Let the "concept, reason, very personal need" in the artist's choices live on in the artist's copy--once the copy is mine, then the copy is mine, period. The world is a more beautiful place because people are defying your wishes on this issue.

Copyright law is NOT about protecting the integricy of the work. Copyright law is about providing incentive to produce creative works. Go take a look at the constitution. There is nothing there about "protecting integrity

 I'll grant this, but I often question whether or not it is a necessary incentive to produce creative works.  In my dreamier moments I think the act of creativity itself is a necessity, for some, perhaps, an overwhelming necessity. We need to recognize that most of the creative work done in the history of the west was done before the idea of intellectual property was even invented.  Bach borrowed copiously from Vivaldi--no footnotes, and no accusations of plagiarism or violation of his rights.  Other composers have returned the favor.  What Copyright law is about, it seems to me, is the commodification of creativity, which is o.k., I guess, but I'd be hard put to defend that it is necessary to creativity.  Even today, I suspect most creative work is not protected by formal copyright... though the aesthetic elite would deny much of it has any artistic merit.  The work is given to the world as a gift, by people who don't much care if they make a buck out of it or not.  Some of it is good enough, or novel enough to be dubbed "folk art" by the taste-makers, and wind up in museums, with or without much compensation to the creators.

I think nobody yet knows what the creation of the Internet is going to do to this sense of right to intellectual property--to copyright thought.  I'd be willing to bet a small sum that it is going to make defense of copyright all but impossible eventually.  It is also going to make plagiarism difficult to define or prosecute.  How many times does a phrase have to appear before it becomes "public domain"?  In the world of the Internet that happens in hours.  In print, much longer.

Finally, with a great deal of affection and gratitude to those who do it, I applaud everyone in the "open source" community.  Those who create code and deliberately give it away, in the hopes that others can use it for their own creative work.   I also applaud those who publish poetry on the net, art on the net, plays on the net, short stories on the net, full novels on the net, and encourage others to pass them on.  They frequently beg people not to mutilate what they've done and given freely.  But they don't try to protect their creations from mutilation.  They rely on an ethic which isn't in the Constitution (neither is anything about copyright, except by implication) but is older than the constitution, which is the ethic which says I will respect the giver by respecting the gift. 

p.s.  To the makers of the software which lets me proofread this little piece of writing without paying for the privilege, profound thanks.

Mike

You're thinking in far shorter time-spans than I am.  I approach some of this as an historian, which is how I earn my bread and butter.  All cultural products decay across time.  If a company purchases the rights to a cultural product, modifies the product, and lets the original product decay, then there is no original product to restore.  There are cases which which film historian can quote in more detail than I can.  A number if classic films have simply disappeared because the celluloid upon which they were printed was not adequately stored under archival conditions.  In some cases this happened because the original company was careless.  In others, the entire library of a company was purchased, and culled by the purchasing company.  The library of MGM, if I remember correctly, had this happen to it. 

We don't know what the shelf-life of materials stored digitally is, because the media upon which it is stored is too new.  Will it be as durable as cuneiform tablets (we've got 5000 year old examples of those) or paper?  We simply don't know.  We do know that materials 80 years old are now unplayable.  My original objection was to the idea of defending any kind of bowdlerization.  If one doesn't want one's kids to see something, then don't buy it.  Let them see it later.  (Yes, I know Mother Goose cleans up the fairy tales--as do translations of those collected by the Brothers Grimm).  But if the "cleaned up" version enters popular culture and replaces the original version in the public memory, there is likelihood that the real version will become the "lost" version.  The alternate problem is that there may be so many variant versions that nobody will know which is the most authentic representation of the creator's intent. 

Mike

Not under the title Jefferson Bible with the author line, "Abridged and Amernded by Thomas Jefferson" and a forward reading "I've removed all the nasty bits for the following reasons. . ."

Mike

No, I cannot. That's something you learn as a responsible member of civilization - that we have the duty and privilege to husband resources for future generations because they have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness just as we do.

Artists have the right just as inventors do (and are protected by patent law) to benefit from their work, free from the interference and censorship of others.

Well, I could argue that they indeed failed - we still have suffering, we still have war, we still have propaganda - but I could also argue that now people see something very different in them, and still the form is uniquely executed and visionary.

Just because some things aren't universally considered art, it doesn't mean that nothing is universally accepted as art. Copyright law protects them both.

It baffles me that people think it is perfectly acceptable for an inventor to profit from his creation and be protected from piracy, but an artist should donate his creation to the world with the understanding that others can do anything they please with it.

An altered Picasso is worth considerably less than a Picasso in original condition and a copy is worth nothing - the reason of course, is that it is no longer a Picasso.

Good night from a very heavy and oppressively humid night in Cincinnati.
Bev

But isn't there also the possibility that the variant version is the only one that survives--that without the variant version, NO version of the original exists? I suspect that most of the cases of the phenomenon you're talking about are precisely those cases in which the survival of ANY version was most in doubt.

I might be able to accept a world in which the original work was always protected--as long as that protection was unconnected to copyright. History belongs to humanity, not to the copyright holder. CleanFix would be banned, but so would Greedo shooting first.

Slander, plagiarism, false attribution--whatever, if you're only objection is to falsely claim that my edited copy is the original, then I share the objection. If you want to stop me from editing the copy that I purchased, without making any sort of false claims, then we are completely at odds.

I wouldn't be here without my parents, but my parents don't get to dictate my life. Just because you create it doesn't mean it belongs to you--the artist is a part of the work, but is not the entirety of the work. Every song is an echo of the harmony of spheres, every painting is a reflection of God's landscape.

Who the heck cares whether they had permission or not? The question from a POLICY standpoint (I realize that copyright law may consider this infringement) is whether CleanFlix is a pirate or whether they are adding value. Adding value is the purpose of Copyright, or as the constitution puts it, to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts".

Bear in mind that there are lots of directors who buy into the auteur theory and would never allow a studio to license a film to a company like CleanFlix. So licensing won't work (unless the government makes it compulsory, which would make the DGA scream). Otherwise, you need to just allow CleanFlix to do what is doing. That it may not be allowed to do so shows a serious problem with the copyright laws.

By the way, I say this as a person who would NEVER knowingly buy a censored DVD.

You've identified the legal issue but not the policy issue. While I agree it does turn on whether they are making copies, it shouldn't. It should turn on whether the copies they are making divert sales or provide a social benefit (defined as something that people want and will pay for).

In that sense, CleanFlix is no different than a contractor that alters the DVD's after the fact. They should be treated the same under the law, though I agree they are not now.

Bev, every time a person leaves a theater for popcorn and misses a plot point, they see a different film than the artist intended. Every time a person hits fast forward, they see a different film than the artist intended. Every time a person watches an edited version on an airplane or television, they see a different film than the arist intended.

The fact is, CleanFlix is one more way in which people can see movies in ways other than the way the artist intended. It doesn't interfere with people seeing the uncensored versions if that is what they want to see.

(Further, I might note that the theatrical release versions of many movies are not made the way the artist truly intended, because the artist almost never has the final cut.)

The real problem here is that our copyright laws, since the 1960s, have moved increasingly pro-corporate. And further and further away from what the original intention of "copyright" was in our Constitution. (The framework of the law actually pre-dates that document.)

Our first copyright law, in 1790, allowed a term of exclusivity for the author/inventor for 14 years. As others have already pointed out, the idea was that the creator would make some money off it, but then after a reasonable amount of time, the work would be placed into the commons, for the public good.

Today, after Congress has messed with the law, that term of exclusivity has been increased to 95 years. Lessig details all this quite clearly in Free Culture.

The point is that our copyright laws today serve corporations, not the public.

To argue the director deserves to have his or her original vision served requires accepting the idea that intellectual property is equal to physical property -- I "own" it, and you can't have it.

That's the game the movie and recording industry lobbies play. But it has nothing to do with the concept of "copyright."

Protecting someone's artistic vision is a tempting pitch, but it's a pitch that was created by corporate lobbies and a willing Congress, and it has nothing to do with serving the public's interest.

Lessig makes this argument quite eloquently and coherently in his book, and I suggest people read that, before defending an artist's right to never-ending (in all practicality) exclusivity.

Have questions about the Cafe? Try here.

Until you can tell me the universal value of protecting art, given the lack of Constitutional, statutory, and copyright regulatory guidance, I have to say that "art" conveys no special requirements on the holder to protect and preserve.

If it is a universal responsibility, what should be the response of a devout Muslim to this portrait of Muhammad dictating the Koran to a scribe?

What disciplines do you consider to be within the protected realm of art? My sketches of the cat next to me clearly are visual art of questionable skill, but they are clearly my own work. Now, take any of the Star Wars movies. Who is the artist whose rights must be preserved? If you acknowledge multiple artists, what if their opinion is different? Does the fact that the movie was produced as a commercial endeavor and financed by stone-hearted financial people have anything to do with rights? If the financial people decided that pulling all copies off the market for a time is optimal for them, can they do so?

A real challenge: Frank Sinatra gave a brilliant performance in The Manchurian Candidate. Horrified by the possibility of copycats, he bought up all available copies with the intention that they never be shown. Does his right supercede the rights of those that would watch this piece of visual and performance art?

Again, what constitutes the arts? Visual only? You dismissed Gacy and Hitler and Churchill as unskilled and unworthy, so who decides when an opus deserves the Protection of Art?

Music? Dramatic performances? Fiction? Nonfiction, remembering histories and biographies have been lasting treasures--Homer is not art? The ill-defined emerging category of "performance art", even if the performance a one-time act, and that the performer forbids recording?

That last seems to set the rights of the artist against the societal right and rsponsibility you are claiming.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Well, that was my point - we protect all artists with the copyright laws, because we don't know.

A collaborative effort is protected as a whole.

Star Wars is the vision of Lucas, he owns it, he can do with it what he pleases. However, buying a copy of the film doesn't give anyone the right to edit it or change it. The copyright laws protect Lucas from anyone doing just that.

Frank Sinatra didn't own the copyright to "The Manchurian Candidate".

Yes, music, drama, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, sculpture, painting is art. Not all art, though, is equal. We can enjoy it all, but some people are better artists than other. It is also physically impossible to "save" all art, but that which is good, should be saved. I think that Falling Water is as deserving of preservation as Versailles.

Performance art isn't meant to be "saved". It is ephemeral in concept and its nature.

On reflection, performance art is a good example of what I am getting at - if we don't understand it, if we are not educated, if we don't understand its purpose, then we can't make value judgements and discern what is good and what is bad. Not all art is equal, but all artists deserve protection from others poaching their work.

If I purchased your photographs and cropped them the way I would like them and then sell them as your work, I don't think you would think that is fair or right. And it wouldn't be.

Copyright doesn't prevent us from "standing on the shoulders of giants." It protects the giants from alteration before we meet them and admire them.

Just curious, suppose a group like CleanFlix came up with a different business model and software tool. Instead of modifying a movie in any way perceptible to a human viewer, suppose they tagged the film in some way that was readable only by machine, and provided an index with a list of scenes that they identified as potentially objectionable. It would then be up to the viewer to select the scenes they wanted expurgated from a menu, and when they watched the film the DVD player would automatically advance the movie past those scenes. The tagging mechanism could actually work as an overlay (ie. Scene N, from time XXhrs:YYmins:ZZsecs to time AAHrs:BBmins:CCsecs, contains nudity) so that the underlying film was not altered in any way except when viewed through this mechanism. In fact, once the tagging was done, you could go buy a copy of the unmodified film from Amazon.com and play it through this mechanism.

In this scenario, CleanFlix would not be altering the film at all; its viewers would be altering it virtually.

Would such a scheme satisfy both Nathan and those who insist on artistic integrity? As far as I know, no conception of copyright prevents me from buying a reproduction of the Mona Lisa and looking at it through a collander.