A website that filters out what it believes to be objectionable content is in contravention of copyright law, according to a federal court.
VidAngel clips out scenes it feels are inappropriate and then streams the edited content, giving viewers the choice of what scenes they can view.
A video-on-demand streaming service that enables the filtering of objectionable content to make it family friendly is breaking US copyright law, a federal appeals court ruled.
The service, VidAngel, buys movie discs and decrypts and rips them. It then streams versions that allow customers to filter out nudity, profanity, and violence. In doing so, it breached the performance rights of Disney, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Fox, and Warner Brothers, the court ruled. VidAngel purchased a disc for every stream it sold, some 2,500 titles in all.
VidAngel also unsuccessfully argued that it was protected under the Family Movie Act (FMA) of 2005. That legislation allows the cracking of encryption to remove objectionable content so long as no fixed copy of the altered version is created.
The court didn’t agree, however, because VidAngel didn’t have the permission in the first place to stream the content.