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Who has made the argument that skipping commercials violates a corporation's First Amendment rights? Can you provide a link?


Eric Goldman (blog.ericgoldman.org) did a number of roundup pieces around first amendment defenses against prosecution under the CAN-SPAM laws, and the one of the arguments set forth by the MPAA in its defense of the DMCA was that its commercial speech rights were violated by people who could use DECSS(sp?) to unencrypt their DVDs and just watch the video content without the commercials. I'll see if I can find the case id and post a link.


It is not quite the same thing, but close enough that someone might be able to make a legal leap...

There are/were services that would make edits of existing films to take out the "naughty bits" and repackage them for sale as a family friendly edit of the original film. These derivative works were not authorized by any of the original copyright holders and the censoring services lost the case (Clean Flicks of Colorado, LLC, et al. v. Steven Soderbergh, et al.) This particular case probably hinged more on how the first sale doctrine worked for digital works, but there were copyright issues raised and the judge did find that the edits were not protected by any fair use claims.

From censoring out tits to skipping commercials is a jump, and this would probably only be applicable to making and distributing copies of dvds that cut out any of the annoying warnings/ads/"coming attractions" (e.g. adding this ability to players or distributing the edits and jumps via an additional channel would not be covered) but it is a precedent to consider...


Those are copyrights, not First Amendment rights.




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