skuhn8 wrote:David Mackenzie wrote:A good solution would be for Blu-ray Disc commentaries. Store the commentary on a web server and include it as a downloadable feature. Have the disc authored to permit playing audio tracks from local storage. The commentary is not on the disc.
A good solution to what?
A good solution to the fact that you now have to pay the BBFC to vet commentaries. Originally, they were considered audio supplements, and therefore not technically within their remit (the BBFC also doesn't vet stills or onscreen text), but they recently decided that the film plus commentary is a new "video work". Fortunately, this isn't being applied retrospectively.
This, incidentally, is why you were spared a commentary on
Valerie and her Week of Wonders by myself and my regular writing partner - Second Run was keen, but just couldn't afford either the recording or classification costs. So the material I dug up during research ended up as a short video intro, which was much cheaper both to shoot (as it didn't require studio facilities with Digibeta playback) and to classify (as it was much shorter).
peerpee wrote:What we need is a few companies to grow some balls and say no to it all.
The problem there, as you've presumably recognised in your own situation, is that you'd need these "few companies" to represent physical distributors and retailers as well as the DVD labels (and their parent companies) - since they'd presumably also be sued for being part of the Video Recordings Act-infringing supply chain. For an equivalent, the likes of WHSmiths could be sued along with the publishers of libellous material, which was why that chain wouldn't stock
Private Eye for decades and why the
New Statesman was left with a hefty bill over the John Major libel affair even before the matter was aired in court, because the mag's distributors caved in immediately and passed the costs on.
That said, I can think of quite a few films that have sneaked onto the UK market without a BBFC certificate despite technically requiring one - I have a VHS of
Alexander Nevsky with the restored score, and presumably the classical label that released it considered it broadly equivalent to one of their operas, which as music works aren't subject to classification. Yet the film is visually identical to any other release of
Nevsky, which most certainly
is subject to classification under the VRA. I'm assuming ignorance rather than deliberate deception on the part of the label, but they seem to have got away with it for at least fifteen years.
My own solution, though, would be to modify the VRA to allow smaller labels to bypass the BBFC vetting process altogether. This will inevitably mean that some of the larger retailers won't touch their product, but that's hardly going to have a major impact on niche-market items - and it's broadly similar to the system that's currently operating in the US, whereby opting out of MPAA vetting means restrictions on distribution and advertising. Illegal material is already covered by the criminal law, and the label can always opt in to BBFC vetting if there are concerns in that department (and the BBFC can be genuinely helpful in this area).
(Abolishing the VRA outright, however desirable, isn't feasible - for various reasons, the majors are rather keen on it, not least because it favours them over independents).
