| An ethical DVD player goes on sale in the US High technologies are put in place to protect the moral foundations of American film fans. Wal-Mart, the largest overseas retail chain, will have a new DVD player on sale in the coming days. For just $79, Americans will be able to get themselves a home censor - the device will independently cut scenes of violence, nudity and obscene language from films.
The player is produced by the French company RCA, but a scheme for a kind of moral purification of films on DVD was invented by craftsmen from the American state of Utah. The technology developed by the American company ClearPlay is quite simple. It is based on preliminary scanning of films and recording information about bloody or vulgar scenes into the device’s memory. Currently, the device has more than 500 films stored in its memory - from the 1974 comedy “Young Frankenstein” to “The Matrix” and the latest Harry Potter films.
In the USA, by the way, cut versions of films have been sold for quite some time, but most of the copies were produced illegally or in violation of copyright. But many experts are already predicting popularity among puritanically raised Americans for a DVD player equipped with the ClearPlay program. After all, the owner can not only use the versions of films offered by the automatic censor, but also set and adjust the parameters of cut scenes and muted words at his own request.
A similar program to support the moral stability of moviegoers appeared at the end of 2001, but it could only be purchased via the Internet directly on the website of the developer company. Representatives of the film industry treated her quite leniently at first. However, the message that the player might appear in retail sales immediately caused a wave of protest among directors and producers. In their opinion, such a program is not at all safe and is a crude censorship device. Within days of this announcement, the Directors Guild of America sued the company, claiming that its technology was “a violation of the director’s creative intent and a distortion of his work.” Not only ClearPlay suffered in the lawsuit, but also the viewers. According to Hollywood directors, by buying such DVD players, citizens are actually committing the theft of intellectual property. The developers themselves claim that they are not creating any new versions of films, but only changing the order in which the information encoded on the DVD is played.
It should also be noted that in the last five years this is not the first program that allows you to “simulate” films for home viewing. And if ClearPlay deals with controversial scenes and expressions quite harshly, simply cutting out or drowning them out, then a program called Movie Mask, which was also developed by the Americans, quite funny sketches what, in the opinion of its creators, should not be seen by a respectable American family man . So, for example, the program dressed the half-naked Kate Winslet, posing for Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in the film Titanic, in a corset; in the scene of the shooting of the guards in The Matrix, bullet holes were covered with multi-colored stars. There is another “puritanical” program - Eyedecide, however, it just covers obscenities with black rectangles and “hammers” obscene expressions with the characteristic and familiar sound “beep”. Anna ShPAK |
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