A new bill in Congress introduced by a Utah Republican would update a 2005 law that prevented online movie streaming services such as VidAngel from automatically censoring, or “filtering,” supposedly objectionable scenes for “family friendly” viewing.
The proposed new version of the law would allow filtering services to operate without worrying about copyright violation concerns. The bill, H.R. 6816, was introduced on September 13 by Mia Love, a 42-year-old, second-term Republican from Utah’s fourth district, which covers parts of Salt Lake City and County.
Love’s "Family Movie Act Clarification Act of 2018” would allow streaming services to "limit portions of audio or video content for private viewing" on the condition that "no fixed copy of the altered version is created."
In 2016, a court ruled that VidAngel was in violation of the copyrights held by movie studios, because it operated its streaming service by stripping digital copyright protections from DVDs, then streaming the DVDs for customers online with scenes of nudity, violence and profane language censored.
Under the 2005 law, the “Family Home Movie Act of 2005,” customers who purchased physical DVDs were permitted to alter or censor their content for private viewing purposes only. VidAngel tried to get around that law’s requirements by requiring customers to purchase a DVD for $20, which would then be “filtered” and streamed by VidAngel, after which the customer would supposedly sell the DVD back to the company for $19.
But a court didn’t agree that VidAngel had found a valid loophole in the law, and slapped the company with an injunction. Under the bill introduced by Love, however, "no person asserting the rights of a motion picture copyright owner may prevent or impede" a streaming service from filtering content. The bill is now awaiting consideration by the House Judiciary Committee.
What sort of content do “family” viewers prefer not to see in their streamed Hollywood movies? A study released in July of this year by the University of California at Los Angeles Law School, showed that—based on analysis of 3.6 million VidAngel video streams—sex scenes, specifically those involving female nudity, were filtered by users more than any other type of video content, including violence which was filtered out slightly more than half as often as scenes depicting sex.
Language was not surprisingly the most-filtered audio content. But while, predictably, the word “fuck” was filtered by user requests in 60 percent of its uses in the streams surveyed by the UCLA study, the number-one most-filtered word, blocked by users 69 percent of the time, was “Christ.”
That term was closely followed by the word “dink,” which was filtered in 68 percent of its occurrences, while “orgasm” (57 percent) and “Jesus” (53 percent) rounded out the top five.
Image via VidAngel / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
