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Court Forbids Cutting Nudity, Profanity from Hollywood Films

By John Jalsevac

COLORADO, July 10, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A U.S. District Court judge has ruled that the editing of Hollywood films by third-parties desiring to make them more family friendly infringes upon copyright laws.

The decision will affect a wide-ranging collection of companies and distributors that specialize in the increasingly booming business of offering values-conscious parents and families the option of enjoying big-name Hollywood films without having to worry about jumping on the fast-forward button on time.

Nearly all of the major Hollywood film studios involved themselves in the lawsuit in some measure, including MGM, Time Warner, Sony Pictures, Walt Disney, Dreamworks, and many others, as well as a formidable list of Hollywood’s most accomplished directors.

 “Their (studio and directors) objective…is to stop the infringement because of its irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies,” wrote District Court Judge Richard P. Matsch in his decision. “There is a public interest in providing such protection.”

“Audiences can now be assured that the films they buy or rent are the vision of the filmmakers who made them and not the arbitrary choices of a third-party editor,” said Michael Apted, president of the Director’s Guild of America, in response to the decision.

One of the companies affected by the decision is CleanFlicks. The family-values conscious company edits major Hollywood films for offensive content, and then sells the edited version along with an accompanying copy of the original, untouched film. The original is purchased by Cleanflicks, ensuring that the film studio receives proper remuneration for each edited film CleanFlicks sells.

Cleanflicks’ slogan reads “It’s all about choice.” In the last number of years the distributor has found an increasing market for such "choice," with close to 90 video stores across the United States stocking their shelves with the edited films.

“We’re disappointed,” said CleanFlicks chief executive Ray Lines according to AP. “This is a typical case of David vs. Goliath, but in this case, Hollywood rewrote the ending. We’re going to continue to fight.”

The move towards the third-party editing of films began in 1998 when a small-town Utah video store edited the movie Titanic so as not to include a shot of a naked Kate Winslet. With the increasing dearth of family-friendly films coming out of Hollywood in recent years, other entrepreneurs quickly picked up on the idea, and an industry was born.

Many have complained that since Hollywood refuses to make cleaner versions of films available to the buying public—despite the fact that studios regularly and significantly edit their films for airline audiences—it has been necessary for third-parties to perform the service.

“Hollywood may claim that the underlying issue is one of artistic integrity, or the inviolable nature of the filmmaker’s vision,” complained film critic Michael Medved in March of 2000, “but how then can you explain the existence of the carefully altered airline versions – not to mention occasional edits for broadcast on network TV?”

“When a mighty industry purportedly dedicated to maximizing profit refuses to [make family-friendly versions available], pointlessly alienating family audiences from enjoying any version of their product, then the entertainment world has indeed been turned topsy turvy.”

Judge Matsch ordered that four of the larger distributors of such edited films turn all their product over within five days to be destroyed.

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