We are in crunch-time but here goes..

As for Ryan’s comment, I only know of one other company that supports playback editing vs save-editing from multiple video sites – BubblePLY. It’s a whole different ball game for us – our editing tools support video sources that we can’t control. Others manage the video, uploaded on their services neatly prepped for their specific editing environment.

As for Alan – Cleanflicks purchased DVDs, edited them, and sold or rented them. They were shut down in the end because the altered the original video and then profited from the resale. A competitor of theirs, Clearplay, however, was not shut down because their service controlled playback of the original DVD in a special DVD player that used a USB stick and filters downloaded from their site.

The “is it right question” – god that’s a big one. It’s a long discussion that I cant do justice to in the time that I have. In short – we live in a connected community now where information & content flows like liquid. The fact that it’s digital is new, but it’s been happening for thousands of years. The Bible is a mashup of all things. Our focus is to offer tools to help people communicate ideas and express their creativity.

Do you mean the violence of having to edit, or the violence of having your creation altered by someone else, without your permission?

The interesting thing about this approach is that it’s the video equivalent of “framing” someone else’s webpage in your own webpage.

There were a lot of court cases about that in the 90′s and it was firmly decided by everyone that it would not be allowed or proper to do.

Then came the court cases for software altering works that the Director’s Guild filed against Cleanflicks (http://www.dga.org/news/v273/feateditingmyfilm.php3)
for letter users buy DVDs and play them without the violence, sex or whatever they didn’t like.

Note here on the Cleanflicks site that they lost:
http://www.cleanflicks.com/saleover.php

So that’s the end of that. I notice that very few Web 2.0 companies pay any attention to copyright issues when they build and they have no sense of history (2002 was the Cleanflicks casee era).

Cuts is cool, but I wonder if they are only going for material licensed for remixing, or if they are just going to do it to everyone?

One the one hand, we should have a culture that wants and allows the complete remixing of cultural artifacts without thinking that the creation is less because of the later alteration. On the other, it’s currently and explicitly against the law.

But for now, you don’t show Cuts being very considerate of what the creators want, and to me, that seems part of building any good Web 2.0 business.

I feel like to the user it makes a difference that with Cuts you can grab a movie from another site rather than having to upload. When I’ve been playing with the other sites I haven’t noticed anyone else who does it this way, but please correct me if I’m wrong.

This is the way most online video editors work–some systems do it server-side, and some client-side, but in either case the edits are just metadata applied dynamically to original media sources.