PROVO, Utah (AP) — Film editors were back in the cutting room just a few months after a federal appeals judge ruled last year that they could no longer edit movies to make them acceptable family fare.Thanks to what they say is a loophole in copyright law that allows cuts for educational purposes, some of the companies that were ordered to turn over their inventory to Hollywood studios instead are scrubbing more movies, and other firms are getting into the market.
Film editors say the education clause can be used to get around the July 2006 ruling by Judge Richard P. Matsch that sanitizing movies on DVD or VHS tape violates federal copyright laws. The ruling was thought to have marked the end of a three-year legal battle between several film editing companies and 16 Hollywood directors started by a Colorado CleanFlicks store.
Matsch ordered Utah-based CleanFlicks and others named in the suit, including Play It Clean Video of Ogden and CleanFilms of Provo, to stop deleting racy scenes to clean up movies for rental and ordered the businesses to turn over their inventory to the movie studios within five days.
At the time of the ruling, CleanFlicks said it sold scrubbed films to as many as 90 video stores nationwide, about half of them in Utah, home to a large population of Mormons. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints discourages members from watching R-rated films.
A message left Sunday on a Director's Guild of America media contact line was not immediately returned. The guild represented many of the parties involved with the original Colorado lawsuit against CleanFlicks.
1 comment:
Well, how nice for them.
When they get around to making the educational version of Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, then I'll get pissed.
Maybe Utah should just have its own film industry. We won't watch theirs and they won't watch ours.
More and more that South Park in which a rabbit is made pope seems like the right idea.
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