Petteri Pyyny
11 Apr 2004 3:28
RCA has announced that it will start shipping DVD players in the United States that will automatically censor offensive language, nudity, violence and other "offensive" content from DVDs that are played with the device. Retail giants Wal-Mart and Kmart will sell the players for $79.
Technology is based on content censoring technology developed by an American company called Clearplay. They've developed a database that contains time/frame database of over 500 movies and flags that mark the offensive material for each of the DVD in the database. The player will recognize the movie and automatically skip or "bleep" over offensive material when played. It is not known whether the devices are capable of updating their movie databases via Net connection or by other means in order to censor the new movies as well.
Clearplay -- as well as several other censoring technology companies -- has been sued by major Hollywood studios and directors. Directors say that such methods where a device alters a movie that they've created, without director's permission, violates against their intellectual property rights and destroys the artistic vision the director has created to the movie. It is obviously time to ask whether it would make sense not to purchase movies that have rating other than G (general audiences) in the first place if the buyer is not prepared to see anything other than "G" rated material.
Source: BBC