New copyright bill panders to Christian Right, copyfighters, Hollywood

The House just passed the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, which is a classic DC compromise bill: on the one hand, it panders to the Hollywood filmocrats by promising mandatory beheading for people caught videotaping movies in theatres, and on the other, it throws the tiniest, most noncontroversial of bones to the copyfighters by legalizing tools that automatically fast-forward, audio-mask, and otherwise munge DVDs during playback, a technique largely employed by Christian companies that sell paranoid parents players that guarantee nipple-and-cussword-free playback of movies from the corner Blockbuster.

Weird as it seems, the Directors Guild of America and the studios hated the idea that viewers should be able to skip past the bits they don't want to see while watching movies in their living rooms, proffering a bunch of self-serving, mystical crapola about the need for "artistic integrity" in the viewing experience you get from watching Police Academy n-1. This was transparent horseshit from the same groups that willingly redact their "content" for packaging by the censorious Blockbusters, airline movie providers, and TV broadcasters to eliminate toddler-damaging mentions of bodily fluids and glimpses of hoo-hahs, nee-nos, pee-paws, and other grotendous anatomical elements that no one needs to see more of.

Me, I can't wait to see the reverse: you can already buy guides to film-nudity that provide you with film names and timecode to skip right to that moment in some actor's past when she or he bared all -- a "good-parts" version, if you will. I would happily patronize a "FilthyFlicks" service that promised to lop out all the non-cussin', non-naked parts of the movie, leaving me with nothing but pure, degenerate rot. Link