Clearplay for your Conscience

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but video rental shops aren’t allowed to edit movies anymore. (There is, of course, a loophole of editing movies for educational purposes that keeps some of these rental shops in business). The reasoning behind this District Court decision has to do with the fact that Hollywood does not want video retailers to make money off an “altered” movie, which is clearly copyright infringement. Luckily, for those who enjoy watching movies without being saturated with colorful metaphors, there is an alternative, it’s called Clearplay. Clearplay is a company that sells DVD players that edits movies while your watch them. In other words, they don’t actually alter the physical copy of the DVD, but just take out the dregs while you watch--that’s basically how they get around the copyright laws. Recently Target has begun to sell these DVD players for only $59.99. My family has actually owned one for years and it worked great, until it broke. We bought one of the earliest beta versions since we knew the brainchild behind this product, so they’ve probably worked out all the bugs now. Maybe we’ll get a new one…