Sunday, July 09, 2006

Rewriting Goliath

A judge ruled against several companies which edit the dirty parts out of movies and rent or sell them to people who don’t like dirty parts.  The judge ruled that it was copyright infringement and an injury to the creative artistic expression of the movies.

Of the ruling, CleanFlicks’ chief executive said:
"We're disappointed.  This is a typical case of David vs. Goliath, but in this case, Hollywood rewrote the ending. We're going to continue to fight."

And the irony flies thick with that one.  First, that he’s rewriting the David v. Goliath story by making David out to be a law-breaker getting sued for infringing Goliath’s rights.  Perhaps that part was just edited out of my bible, but I doubt it.  And second, that he’s accusing Hollywood of bad rewrites; which is the offense that his company was denied the right to do: ie, rewrite Hollywood’s movies.

And then there’s the fact that it was a judge who supposedly did the rewrite, and that Hollywood was merely asserting its right of ownership; which the judge agreed with.  But that’s not really irony, as much as another demonstration of the delusional mindset that these people engage in.  Where righteousness is always on the side of the underdog, even if the underdog is wrong.  And how they’re being victimized by Hollywood…because Hollywood won’t allow itself to be victimized.

Of course the real losers in all this are the poor people who can’t enjoy movies the way they were intended.  But I guess we already knew that, didn’t we.

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