The Clan vs SCU

I recently wrote about the lawsuits involving the MPAA, DGA, ClearPlay, and CleanFlicks. Now I am going to write why the whole thing was eye-opening to me.

In the late 90’s and early aughts, some friends and I (the core group being Clint, Kyle, Hubert, and me, for those who keep track of such things) were a part of an amateur production company. We took Japanese animation, spliced it, and changed the story into something funny. As it happens, three of the four productions we took the initial animation from came from a single studio (in the US). And as it happens, they knew what we were doing and could not have cared less. If they had objected, though, we would have objected to their objection. We weren’t selling them. We weren’t impeding the sale of the original item. Our only compensation was having fun and some comp passes to area anime conventions.

Beyond all that, we were also of our generation and had rather… liberal… views of fair use and copyright. I was a Republican, Hugh was a Democrat, Kyle was a Libertarian, and Clint was rather apolitical, but we all agreed on that.

When the ClearPlay thing came up, I looked at it very much the same way that I looked at our productions. There were some key differences, to be sure: ClearPlay was a business and we were not. People using ClearPlay had purchased the original productions, people who got copies of our work did not. Though we never asked for permission, the content-owners were okay with what we were doing. With them, they were not. On the balance, I thought that if anything, ClearPlay had a stronger case than we would if the producers of the fourth production we used ever came after us.

So I was a bit shocked when almost uniformly, everyone else took the opposite perspective. Not just the other three, but non-core contributors as well. Everyone but me agreed: ClearPlay was wrong here. I tried to liken it to what we were doing, but they argued that it was different. Interestingly, they didn’t argue on the profit side, but on the creative side. It was their view that we were creating something new while they were watering down something existing. I asked about The Phantom Edit. They thought that was fine because they weren’t selling it. Okay, but what if they essentially did what ClearPlay was doing and offered a way to skip past Jar-Jar. This stammered them a bit, but they rebounded by arguing that what The Phantom Editors were doing was art while ClearPlay was destroying art.

Destroying art. Those were the words that one of them used. That, apparently, was what it came down to for them. I asked “What about the person that wants to skip past the scene” and the response I got was that people shouldn’t want to skip past violent or sex-filled scenes and there was something wrong with parents that wanted to shield entertainment from their kids like that. They weren’t exactly advocating showing Nightmare on Elm Street to grade-schoolers, but they did not think it was right to get to choose what to show from a particular movie and what not to. They should either show them the movie, or not show them the movie.

As an aside, we did a lot of our editing in the town of a very conservative university, Southern Cross University, that one of our core members attended. They had “movie night” and mercilessly edited movies, replacing words with rather silly stand-ins. We attended one of the features and heard about a lot of the others. They cut The Matrix down to 90 minutes for content. At that point… what’s the point, exactly? I’d actually suggested, for one of our productions, we should do the a Ridiculous Edit version.

Anyhow, it occurred to me that what a lot of this came down to wasn’t the issues at stake. It wasn’t copyright or fair use. It was the sheer animosity towards the people that showed the sorts of movies that they showed at SCU. It was, in a way, a desire to deprive them of the ability to easily massacre movies the way that they did. It wasn’t about the law, it was about culture. And to an extent, it was about us-and-them. Siding with the likes of Utahns and SCU was simply out of the question.

Which brings me, momentarily, back to the Ridiculous Edit version I proposed. I had suggested that we should do it because we could make it funny. I stand by that. But I did have another motive. I wanted the ability to introduce the movie to people who would be offended by the coarse language of the original. A lot of the cursing was unnecessary. Popular with the fans we had, but likely irritating to potential fans.

I consider this about as far from coincidental as possible: Looking back, I had far more animosity towards the MPAA than SCU. They were raised on good on southern religion while I was an Episcopalian. They (at the time, today they run the spectrum of Born Again to staunch atheism) have a history that I don’t. And for my own part, I had been shifting to the right politically and trying to make peace with the same people. I didn’t then, and don’t now agree with them in regard to movie censorship (nor would they have exactly signed on to the MPAA’s agenda), but at least a part of me was trying to find common ground.

As much as we liked to dress it up as arguments for and against – and there are letigimate arguments for and against – a lot of it came down to that visceral reaction and our deeper minds shifting gears mostly to support the original reaction (it took me years to realize that the MPAA did actually sort of have a point here).

Which is something I can’t help but notice occurring… everywhere else. Here at The League, we take pride in our thoughtfulness and some here take pride in their independence. But we’re human, and I think it is rather impossible to separate what is being said from who is saying it.

I will, at some point, write a more complete post on this. The origins of our ideology. My views aren’t actually this reductive. But I think this is an under-investigated phenomenon. Especially among those of us that pride ourselves on such things. It goes beyond enrolling with a team and taking their views wholesale. It’s something that pervades, I think, our response to virtually everything. Not just Republican or Democrat, but the positions we take and values we adopt that push us in one direction or the other.