How many times have we bought a captioned or subtitled DVD only to find that the bonus material or footage was never captioned?
Well, fret no more. The Los Angeles County Superior Court has preliminarily approved settlement of a case that will clearly send the motion picture companies a clear message:
CAPTION THE FRIGGIN’ BONUS FOOTAGE!
And if you’re deaf and can prove that you’ve purchased DVD’s that had uncaptioned bonus material, you may be entitled to piece of the cash settlement!
More information can be obtained by pointing your browser here.
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9 Comments
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The FCC likely won’t enforce this if the companies forget to “caption” the bonus materials over the next five years.
The companies, collectively, are being required to fork over a cool $2M+ to the community - (chump change to them, I know). But after this settlement, I somehow doubt that they’d turn their backs and “forget.” ???
they will because they’d rather pay the fine than be held accountable. Just look at the lack of FCC enforcement regarding captioning on television for example.
aw, Rob– ya beat me to it! Was gonna blog on this. :) Thanks for bringing it up though. No, I think the settlement has some serious problems. Joe Clark, a long-time captioning advocate, wrote an interesting post outlining some of the problems with the settlement. See his analysis here: http://blog.fawny.org/2006/06/02/dvdcc/
After reading his post, and then analyzing the terms myself, I agree with his assessment– too many potential loopholes. We’ll see just how effective this settlement turns out to be…
David, that was such an excellent blog link that I’m going to put it here again to make sure nobody misses it:
http://blog.fawny.org/2006/06/02/dvdcc/
*signs emergency* read it!
He’s right. There are way too many loopholes in that settlement. They should’ve never settled that lawsuit. Ugh.
We’ll have an opportunity to do a better job at a later time, this is a learning experience. At some point someone else (apart from organizations) will get so fed up and sue a class action suit.
Not neccessarily, KBM– if you don’t specifically exclude yourself from the class in the settlement now, then you will be considered part of the class for this suit. That means you will be bound by the agreement, which usually dictates you cannot sue the defendants again later regarding the same issues. That will leave a VERY small pool of people who are legally able to file suit later.
I read all the links provided by Rob and David/Adam. After reading the last link, I was like…ok, so what or which DVD’s CAN be captioned? Lawdy, I just have a headache from reading what each respective studios do not have to do in regards to captioning.
*running off to find pills to kill the headache*