The Couch-Potato Censor

Raise your hand if you wouldn’t mind paying a few extra bucks for a device that promises to zap obscenity, nudity, over-the-top violence and whatever else you don’t want the kids to see while watching a DVD in the living room. Imagine -- no more awkward moments when the plot unexpectedly tumbles into the bedroom, where the actors start shouting words that George Carlin still can’t whisper on broadcast television.

In analog days, parents either ordered the kids from the room or shut down the movie. Digital technology, however, promises to arm parents with filters that will skip potentially offensive words and images.

It’s an attractive concept for those who love movies but don’t like Hollywood excess. But the technology also worries movie creators who are concerned that their work will be distorted by millions of couch-potato censors.

Here’s how it would work. Consumers would buy a specially equipped DVD player and software that must be tailored to each movie. They also would need to rent or buy a legitimate copy of a movie on DVD. The software would use the disc’s internal clock to, say, ignore the audio track 20 minutes into a movie when an actor uses a four-letter word, or even skip lengthy clips when someone strips naked, uses illegal drugs or blasts a dozen cops (bad guys too?) to bits. Some movies that contain all of the above could end up being quite short.

Hollywood is not amused, and we understand its concerns. Certainly we wouldn’t be thrilled if it became a fad for households to cut up, shrink and rearrange their copy of the Los Angeles Times every morning. But this is a losing battle.

Technology is empowering consumers and viewers to become their own editors, whether we’re talking about this new software or the fast-forward button on the old VCR. Moreover, these systems probably do not run afoul of copyright laws as long as they’re used in the home and don’t create a hard copy of the movie that is passed on to others.

Congress seems intent on explicitly approving these systems in the proposed Family Movie Act. The legislation also includes measures, such as toughened criminal penalties for making bootleg DVDs, that address more substantial threats to Hollywood’s intellectual property rights.

Legal or not, we are skeptical about the market for viewer-censoring gadgets. V-chips that restrict offensive TV programming have not exactly caught on, and there is little reason to believe that many people will want to pay extra for the screening filters.

But if there is a market yearning to convert R movies into PG programming, the studios themselves could step in and make an additional profit. They already sanitize movies for TV and airline use, so we can zap their arguments about the inviolability of their artistic vision.