An earlier blogicle here noted that US copyright law does not recognize the moral rights of authors, which in most commercially important countries prevents someone from altering a copyrighted work without the permission of author.
Citing our earlier posting, Art Hutchinson raises additional points:
What needs 'double clicking' here are two things:
1) How blunt is the consumer's right and ability to not watch content they find objectionable? I detect here a strawman of compulsory viewing that no sane person has ever proposed. What's at issue is granularity of control, including the value-adding role of fine-grained preview by a trusted intermediary - a role I play inadequately as a parent, and for which I (and obviously others) would be happy to pay a premium.
Point 1 suggests a most extreme interpretation possible as a way of discrediting the argument.
2) Where does the work end and my experience of it begin? Starting from a presumption that certain elements of control of my experience are well established (e.g., turning the volume up or down, changing the color balance on my television, fast-forwarding through certain sections, walking out if I get bored, turning up the thermostat during a film about climbing Mount Everest, making sarcastic comments to my co-viewers), I find it hard to countenance an argument that says, in essence "all or nothing; my way or the highway". In that sense, it is much like the line-item veto. Interestingly, the political fault lines on this copyright issue (at least so far) appear to mirror those for the LIV. The only thing that's new with Clearplay is the instantiation of these control functions logically separate from the viewing device and the original film. So far, the legal process seems to agree. We see how long that lasts.
Everyone has the right to control their devices. What's different about Clearplay is that they provide templates for creating new works. Here's an admittedly imperfect analogy: there are fundamental differences between a person who in the privacy of their own surroundings finds a way to circumvent DRM and does so for their own purposes such as backup and the same person instantiating the circumvention method in a software program that is widely distributed on the Net and thereby making it available to all.
The distinction Hutchinson fails to make is between what a person does at home on their own and a business distributing templates for creating derivative works or derivative experiences that have the same title and credits as the original but is a different experience.
