Movie captioning battle heats up
The battle lines are being drawn in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, as that court will decide whether the Americans with Disabilities Act requires movies to be captioned, and thereby become accessible to the hearing-loss population.
As we noted in an earlier post, a federal judge in Arizona ruled last spring that showing moves with captions would alter the "product" sold by movie theaters, and that because ADA does not regulate product content, the law therefore did not require theaters to show captioned movies. That case was appealed -- the first movie-captioning litigation to reach the appellate court level.
Generally speaking, the decision of the first federal court of appeals to decide an issue becomes a national precedent, so unless the United State Supreme Court were to step in or Congress were to intervene, the Ninth Circuit decision will essentially become the national rule.
The Washington State Communication Access Project (Wash-CAP) and a number of national organizations filed friend-of-the-court briefs arguing that the Arizona decision should be reversed. While our brief did argue that the Arizona court badly misconstrued the ADA, we also tried to speak from the perspective of people with hearing loss, and explain why captions are so important to us.
The excellent brief from the Arizona Attorney General's office laid out the legal arguments, and those arguments were further fleshed out in friend-of-the-court briefs from the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, the National Association of the Deaf, and the national Disability Rights Network.
The defendant movie theaters and their friend-of-the-court allies will file briefs arguing for affirmance of the Arizona decision. Given the stately pace at which the law operates, we don't expect a final decision until 2010 at the earliest.
Although the NInth Circuit will decide what ADA requires of movie theaters, those theaters are also subject to state law, and the Ninth Circuit decision won't affect those obligations. Wash-CAP is considering whether our exceptionally broad Washington State Law Against Discrimination might provide a separate basis for seeking expanded movie captioning in our state.
