This is a technology with a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) swirling around it on all sides. The bill is law, and that's all well and good, but should you be looking into filtering software to protect your family and/or friends? Let's try to peel back the FUD, shall we?

Why legislate at all?
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was targeted at preventing people from making a living pirating music, movies, and other media. But it has had an impact on all kinds of other uses, and the big movie and music studios have found themselves in the position of suing 12-year-olds in order to protect their rights under the DMCA.

In this case, though, the Directors Guild was suing ClearPlay for violating the DMCA because the Guild asserted that the filters changed the intended content of the movie. It looked like the Directors Guild might win, so Congress stepped in and made it legal for ClearPlay to sell its product, meanwhile throwing a few bones toward the film industry.

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So what does this mean for me?
This means that you, dear movie watcher, are free to buy the product ClearPlay to help you clean up movies that might be appropriate overall but contain some material you'd rather not let your kids see or hear. Interestingly, though, the law protects only ClearPlay. It doesn't do anything for the other filtering systems out there currently being challenged. Any other edits of movies to make them "family-friendly" still suffer some legal uncertainty.

How does ClearPlay work?
How many people are going to use ClearPlay, and should you be one of them? ClearPlay is a subscription service that costs about five dollars a month. You need the following items to make it work.

• A new ClearPlay-enabled DVD player
  
• A subscription to the ClearPlay service that sends you discs with the filters
  
• A movie that ClearPlay has made a filter for
  

So let's say you have a movie that is listed as one that works with ClearPlay, and you bought a new DVD player. You'll need to take the disc of the filter, put it in the DVD player, and go through some steps on your TV screen to install the filters into your DVD player. Among other things, you'll need to tell it what kinds of content you want it to block. Nudity? Objectionable language? There are several settings to go through.

The ClearPlay folks state on their Web site that a ClearPlay-enabled DVD player can store up to 300 movie filters. You'll need to manually remove filters once you get filled up.

Fortunately, this is not a piece of software trying to guess at objectionable material. Apparently ClearPlay employees have viewed the movies and manually marked scenes for filtering. That implies that the filters should work pretty well if ClearPlay has done its job.

Is all that work worth it?
My guess is that not that many people will find it worthwhile to go through all the maintenance required to make these filters work. They'd rather have smart software that they install once or that comes with the DVD. The problem is, that software isn't up to snuff yet. Pre-edited movies are the next best thing, but that means you're at the mercy of the editor, and, as I mentioned, those legalities aren't all smoothed out.

Alternatives to ClearPlay
You also have a few other options that aren't really technological, but which you should consider. You could just pick movies that don't have any content you're not comfortable explaining to your kids. Of course, there may be parts that need some explaining, so that means you have to watch those movies with your kids. Not a bad idea. Alternatively, you can try to ride the fast-forward button.

If you're looking for a way to unleash your kids to watch movies without supervision, ClearPlay may be worth it. Or maybe the time spent maintaining it would be better spent with the kids. That's your call.

Don't filter your opinion, tell us what you think of DVD movie filters, ClearPlay or otherwise.