Hoisting Hollywood

ClearPlay Inc., founded in 1999, develops advanced parental control technologies for consumer electronic products, including DVD players and recorders, TVs, cable and set-top boxes, digital video recorders, etc. The company's first products allow consumers to view DVDs, purchased or rented through conventional retailers, free of unwanted content. It gives consumers the ability to skip and mute over graphic violence, sex, nudity and profanity, if they choose. ClearPlay DVD players and Filters can be purchased at www.ClearPlay.com. Using ClearPlay does not touch, alter or change the DVD in any way. The technology can also be applied to cable, satellite, PVR and video on demand.

Thanks to the Family Movie Act, this is legal.

Justice at work. The film industry capitulated to this legitimation of moral cleansing machines for one reason alone: It was pressing for legitimation of the felonization of copyright violations - peer to peer, camcorders in theaters, etc. It traded off any notion of the artistic integrity of the "product" to protect the viability of the commodity form of film distribution.

So instead of artistic considerations of film, there is the protection of the integrity of the thing on which the film is carried:

Using ClearPlay does not touch, alter or change the DVD in any way.

Scions of Valenti! Bliss to the legal standing of your discs! You may no longer pretend to art, but you've got that thinghood thing down. Careful where you sit on those petards.