Ed Felten on the "Family Movie Act" part of the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act

Ed Felten has a pragmatic censorship & free speech analysis of Sections 201 and 202 of the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act. He concludes that the Act does not promote censorship. Alan Wexelblat (Copyfight) appears to agree, and has other links.

The Act seems tailored to let people choose what they want to watch in a movie, and to make DVDs that will let people easily skip scenes they don't want to watch. It requires that the end-user ultimately make the decision about whether to skip scenes. I like that the law implicitly rejects any "moral rights" of a copyright holder by which the copyright holder could force people who buy a movie to watch the whole thing. That's good because the U.S. copyright system is not based on any moral rights in the copyright holder (there is only one exception to this policy I can think of); U.S. copyright law is only supposed to create economic incentives for creative expression. Under the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, the copyright holder in a movie still gets paid for the whole movie, which satisfies the policy of the copyright law.

There are still social questions that arise from this kind of law. For example, if people can simply edit out controversial parts of a film, does that not overly allow people to insulate themselves from artistic efforts to address difficult social issues?

I think the answer is, Maybe so, but copyright law doesn't have anything to say about that.