Buying a DVD does give you rights to format-shift from DVD to something else. So VidAngel is selling the DVD to people, and format-shifting it to digital for people, and then delivering it to them. The end-user has the option to take physical delivery of the DVD, have VidAngel store it forever, or sell it back as a 'used' copy for slightly cheaper.
Not according to this. Granted, it's just a year-old article on a tech site, but according to them, the DMCA forbids consumers from decrypting discs to format shift. Stupid? I think so, but unless the courts change their mind, VidAngel is headed for a world of hurt.
As much as I hate it, ripping for personal use is illegal under the DMCA (anti-circumvention). Ripping for the content editing I think is explicitly separately allowed, but I'm not sure if that's what makes it legal for them. They may be playing the physical disc with an EDL - I don't actually know.
As much as I hate to say it, you are correct (at least as of October of 2015). The legal wrangling came to the conclusion that because CDs were never encrypted, consumers can format-shift. But DVDs and Bly rays? Not so much. However, it seems to me that given the vast number of people that do this "under the radar" it can't be long before an "exemption" is granted to bring this in line with Fair Use.
Filmmakers don't have the right to force you to keep your eyes open for every second of their film. But they do have the right to control how someone distributes a copy of their work. Because copyright, dammit.
I think this will be the salient point of the legal argument. Is VidAngel a distributor? Or are they only reselling discs with filters and letting the consumer apply them as they please?
Yes, the copyright-holders altered their own work. Which they could do. Because they held the copyright. Someone else who wants to do that needs to get permission from the copyright-holder.
Copyright, in part, protects an artist's expression from tampering by others. But they're free to "tamper" with it themselves, because it's their expression.
The only gotcha to this argument is the Family Movie Viewing Act, which is part of the Copyright act, specifically allows a person in their own home modify movies without consent of the copyright holder. VidAngel is arguing that this is exactly what is going on with their service. They provide the movie (unaltered), the filter and let the viewer apply said filter how they wish in their own home. Frankly, I hope VidAngel wins if only so that media producers run into some kind of limit to their seemingly unending power over the consumer.
While I agree with some of your statements and assertions, your conclusion and proposed solution is flawed. Yes, the founding fathers distrusted standing armies and envisioned the 2nd Amendment as a remedy for this. However, some of the founding fathers felt the entire bill of rights as superfluous as the constitution already granted sovereignty to the people, not the elected government. By extension, the notion that there should be a "well armed militia" instead of a standing army is also a contradiction IF (caps on purpose) the army reports to the people. I have no idea how that would be accomplished in practice, but I do know that the order of soap box to ballot box to ammo box is that way for a reason. Power determines the course of civilizations and national and international politics. Money and guns equal power and the federal government started out with neither. Alexander Hamilton provided money to the feds and they use it expertly to influence supposedly sovereign states to bend to their will in small and large ways. Ultimately, it was as you pointed out, the standing army that secured the federal government as the prominent power in our federalism experiment.
Now here is where your conclusion is flawed. Power cannot be taken without power. It can certainly be given up, but that is an idealistic dream. There is not one single case of that ever happening to a nation state without the threat of greater power forced upon it. Machiavelli was right that it is better to be feared than loved and we are proving it again in the USA. The problem is not having guns (power), it's having too many and allowing them to be used for things that they shouldn't be used for. England is an example of what I consider too far to one extreme -- where only hunters are allowed guns and even the police don't regularly carry firearms. I'm not a flag-waiving NRA member, but I do believe that we must uphold the laws of the land, which includes the 2nd amendment. I also believe the US is too far to the other extreme with a militarized police force with too-lax provisions in place to allow them to kill citizens. The founding fathers provided checks and balances at the highest levels of government and I believe this model should be followed down to the lowest levels. If power is the problem, then balancing it is the solution.
Instead of giving up power (guns), we should re-think how guns are distributed and used. I like the Israeli model, where all citizens are trained in the military, possess weapons and know how to use them properly. Their crime rate is famously low for a reason (terrorism aside). My proposal would be to require training for all gun owners (to encourage safe and sensible use), prohibit military weapons or tactics to be used by the police and to return to a state of balance. I could go into greater detail, but I'm neither a lawmaker or policy influencer -- just an armchair philosphizer.
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.