Playing the trumpet in my bed

The reverend Thomas Bowdler was, of course, the English C19th lunatic whose attempts to sanitise Shakespeare - "those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family" - left Othello strangling Desdemona because she played the trumpet, rather than the strumpet of the original, in his bed. Much admired by Swinburne for making the Bard accessible to children, his depredations of everything from Titus Andronicus to The Tempest ran to four regrettable editions.

Now Jeff Jarvis tells us that CleanFlick, a US company  with ambitions of bowdlerising films by "editing out the allegedly naughty bits", has been found to be in breach of copyright.

It continues to strike me as...interesting that things which are done inefficiently by individuals provoke such little censure compared to those same things being done efficiently by technology. Remember Flying J's truck stops, that installed a technology to switch off the TV networks' adverts and insert Flying J's own? Commentators speculated at the time that the networks would have sought redress far less readily if truck stop managers had simply been using their remote control to flick channels during the breaks. Now again a thing that is done anyway by users - flicking away from the "allegedly naughty bits" whilst watching films with children - has become a matter for the courts because a technology has been designed to do the job effortlessly and without error.

The film studios should be delighted that someone has found a commercial model for distributing edited versions of their output rather than setting out in yet another weary battle against the express wishes of their customers. This is another iteration of the problem of the audience as enemy. LucasArts made not a penny from the far superior Phantom Edit - like so much video content in the BitTorrent age, it was simply circulated free of charge online. Sure, CleanFlick and the studios need to agree a revenue share model, but apart from that what are the studios hoping to achieve by banning them? The editing moves underground, the possibility of a revenue model evaporates and the studios turn another segment of its audience into ex-customers.