Sunday 3 March 2013

Cleanflix

So that was a very interesting documentary, but there's a lot there to unpack.

In Utah, there was a company that edited movies to remove sex and other scenes. Now if a person wants to do that to their own DVDs, fine, whatever. But then to go and sell/rent those movies, ie make a profit off of modified works (and yes they are breaking copyright, no matter how carefully they rip DVDs), then... well... that's illegal. And so they got shut down. And so did the next company. Fine, I'm right with that.

But there's clearly a market for those movies, so Hollywood is being stupid not to cater to it. If they are that stupid, then frankly people are going to take advantage of it to make a profit.

How that fits into the Mormon ethics... I can't say. (And presumably there are Mormons who watched the unedited versions to work out which bits to edit, so what of them?)

But to draw attention to what you are doing? That's stupid too. And it doesn't help when one of the most vocal of the distributors is also getting jailed for extremely dodgy practices on the side, but that's as aspect that not helping anyone. (Although I was continually wondering how many of them said on camera 'I want to watch a clean version of the film', but really wanted to watch the unclean version. I'm guessing a lot, 'cos I'm cynical like that.)

People want an edited, 'clean', version of movies. Fine. People are editing movies. Fine. People are making profit from that. Not fine. Hollywood isn't making them legally either. Stupid. People are idiots all over the place... that's people for you.

Anyway, interesting documentary, as I said, although it's not clear how sensational it being (or wanted to be) at times.

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