Judge Rules Movie Sanitizing Illegal

Companies will no longer be able to "sanitize" movies in order to make them appropriate for specific audiences thanks to a federal court ruling over the weekend. Calling their businesses "illegitimate," Senior U.S. District Court Judge Richard Matsch said movie studios had the right to control the content of their work.

CleanFlicks of Colorado along with other companies were targets of a lawsuit filed by the Directors Guild of America in September 2002. Eight Hollywood studios later joined the case three months later. While CleanFlicks and others tried to defend their actions on First Amendment grounds, the DGA said it was copyright infringement.

In an attempt to claim "fair use," the movie sanitizers would offer the official copy along with the edited copy with each transaction. Mastch said such actions did not constitute fair use under current law. Instead, he said the copyright owner is the one that can make the choice of what audience it wants for a particular piece.

"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," DGA President Michael Apted said in a statement. With some of these companies, the choice of what was edited out generally occurred across moral lines.

For example, Family Flix, which has since shut down due to the ruling, edited movies to remove "homosexuality, perversion and co-habitation." Others companies sanitized film based on religious principles.

Although the ruling prevents the editing of movies, it does not cover those who mute or skip portions of a movie to hide objectionable content. The WGA said in a statement that it is concerned about the exception, yet did not say if it planned separate legal action against those organizations.