VidAngel: Content filtering technologies, religion, and American copyright law

Abstract

This article traces a cultural history of the visual media filtering industry in the United States—from VHS tapes to internet filters to digital streaming platforms. Through an analysis of the company VidAngel, a video filtering start-up, and its recent copyright lawsuit brought by a group of major Hollywood film studios, we highlight the influential role that religion and copyright law, as interanimating forces, have played in the development of content identification and moderation technologies and practices. Emerging from this cultural history is a discourse that insists consumer rights to protect their families from morally objectionable content outweigh the copyrights of content creators. Used as a legal justification for content filtering, this family media rights discourse conflates personal moral decisions based on conservative religious values with neoliberal consumer empowerment in an effort to subvert hegemonic media systems by returning the power of media influence to private families in private settings. This article argues that religiously-motivated systems to identify and remove morally objectionable content have not only resulted in innovative business models targeting niche conservative religious audiences but that such businesses inevitably challenge and shape U.S. copyright law, significantly impacting several areas of contemporary media regulation well beyond the Mormon communities at the center of this narrative.

Keywords:

• Content identification
• content moderation
• video filtering
• copyright law
• religion
• Mormonism
• family media rights

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gavin Feller

Gavin Feller (Ph.D., University of Iowa) is a postdoctoral research fellow in digital humanities at Umeå University (Sweden). His research explores the cultural impact of emerging media technologies with a focus on power, community, and identity. His forthcoming book (University of Illinois Press) traces a twentieth-century cultural history of new media and religion in America through the lens of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS/Mormon). His latest research examines the technical infrastructures and cultural ideologies of children and 'family-friendly' digital media.

Andrew Ventimiglia

Andrew Ventimiglia (Ph.D., University of California, Davis) is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication with a focus on media law and ethics. His research explores the history and cultural effects of intellectual property with a focus on the role of copyright and trademark law in American religion. His first book, Copyrighting God: Ownership of the Sacred in American Religion was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. He has articles published or forthcoming in outlets including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Cultural Critique, Enterprise & Society, and KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge.