In which I attempt to use ClearPlay

Last week we visited my parents. While we were there, I noticed that they had a ClearPlay DVD player. ClearPlay is a company that creates "filters" for most movies that allow consumers to edit out sex, violence, and profanity from movies. I had seen the ClearPlay devices in stores, but I had never seen how they worked before. So I asked my dad how he liked it, and he confessed that he had never had the time to get it to work, even though they had owned the device for several months. This set some warning bells off in my head -- my dad is considerably more tech-savvy than the average person his age, so if he can't get it to work quickly, there is probably something wrong with the system. So we decided to rent some movies and try to get it to work.

We wanted to try the ClearPlay system on a film that we knew would require a lot of filtering, so we rented Love Actually. I don't think it had any violence, but it had enough nudity and strong language to put the filters to the test. However, just getting to the movie part was near impossible. ClearPlay requires you to install a proprietary program on your computer. It only works for Windows, so Mac and Linux users are out of luck. You then do a search for the movie you want to see, download that filter to a USB drive, and plug the drive into the DVD player. However, we hit problems at almost every step of the process. First, the search function wasn't very good, so if you mispelled a word it wouldn't come up with any results. Secondly, we encountered repeated download errors when we downloaded the filter set. Twice the file was only about 100k of data, when it was supposed to be around 14MB. But we didn't know this at the time, and there was no way to check it without trying it out on the DVD player. Also, on our second attempt, it made us download a firmware update for the player itself that changed the interface and menus on the player. Very confusing.

Once we finally got the filter set on a USB drive properly, we then had to navigate a menu system that wasn't very user friendly. I've seen worse, but this wasn't terribly helpful. The manual that came with the player wasn't very informative, and in any case, the menus had changed somewhat with the firmware upgrade. There were lots of little quirks, like options menus that weren't available on the particular filter we had downloaded. But we didn't know that, so we kept trying to get those options to work. Eventually we got it all figured out and started watching the movie, after three attempts and about 45 minutes of troubleshooting.

The movie-watching experience itself was okay. I can't say exactly how good it would be for most people because the DVD we rented had a lot of skips to it. However, the filter didn't handle the skipping well, and we had some strange garbled portions. In general the editing was fairly unobtrusive, though perhaps not as seamless as the company suggests. Profanity is eliminated by silencing the audio track, which is a lot better than attempting to substitute a tamer vocabulary. Sexual content (and presumably violence) is simply skipped, which can lead to the most disjointed portions. This probably cannot be helped, and it didn't distract too much from the plot of this particular movie.¹

My final analysis is that the ClearPlay system needs to be streamlined, simplified, and the bugs need to get worked out. It has to be dead simple to use. My grandma should be able to use it without a problem. There are other DVD player models that are web-enabled. I assume they make the filter downloading process easier, but setting up a networked device has its own challenges. The on-screen menus probably need to be easier to navigate, and the remote control needs to have better labels. I just don't think it's worth the $80 for the DVD player and the $8/month fee. Maybe if I had more money to throw around, but as it is, it's just not that great.

There's actually a legal angle to my interest in ClearPlay. Filtering and censoring technology presents some thorny intellectual property issues. Generally, it is a lot easier to delete content at the distribution level rather than the consumer level. That's why movies on airplanes and on TV are broadcast in an edited format -- it's a lot easier than having everyone at home use a ClearPlay-like box. This distribution method works fine when the content creators (movies studios, directors, etc.) agree to the edited version. But many directors or producers don't agree to editing their movies -- that's where the demand for edited films comes in. However, in 2006 a Colorado district court decision, a group of directors and movie executives won a lawsuit against CleanFlicks, a company that sold pre-edited videos. (A copy of the decision in here.) The court held that the altering, copying, and distributing performed by CleanFlicks and similar companies violated the directors § 106 rights under the Copyright Act. However, there's a little exception stuck in the Copyright Act when it was amended by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that allows for editing of copyrighted content by a household member -- that's where the ClearPlay device enters the picture. Because you actually download the filter set and apply it to the film, you are doing the editing at home. The distinction is almost trivial, but its enough to keep ClearPlay in buisness, while CleanFlicks was forced to undergo a restructuring and a changed business model.²

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¹ It did lead to some confusion at the end, however, when two characters appeared and we hadn't been introduced to them before. Their storyline involved extended sex scenes, so that part of the plot was eliminated altogether. The movie was so over-stuffed with storylines, however, that I didn't miss it a bit. In fact, I think they should have taken out a few of the other storylines and focused on four or five, rather than eight or so.
² CleanFlicks attempted to shoehorn its business model into the DMCA exception by requiring all customers renting or purchasing edited videos to becomes CleanFlicks members. Customers would therefore all be part-owners of the content, and be free to edit it as they pleased. (A creative interpretation of agency law, perhaps?) Obviously, the federal district court disagreed.