WASHINGTON (Hollywood Reporter) - The third time could be the charm for legislation that would make it a federal crime to camcord a movie and would protect the manufacturers of players that edit out purportedly offensive content from movies.
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Although the Senate late Tuesday approved the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act (FECA) of 2005 -- a package of copyright bills -- for the first time in the 109th Congress, it twice passed the legislation in the 108th only to see it die at the end in a squabble over unrelated legislation.
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Included in FECA is the camcorder legislation, the Family Movie Act and legislation designed to make it easier for law-enforcement officials to combat the growing problem of music and movies being distributed on file-sharing networks and circulating on the Internet before they are released. FECA also contains a measure to reauthorize an existing program for the preservation of historically and culturally significant films.