This week, a federal judge in Denver ruled that two of the companies that create the software used for editing are not at fault because they are protected by the Family Movie Act, which became law last April. But the fight is not over, as Lucky Severson reports.
(Video clip from MATRIX REVOLUTIONS): I get it. You must be ready to die.
LUCKY SEVERSON: This is a scene from the popular movie THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS. In a way, it's symbolic of the battle between what some view as the forces of good and evil -- those who want to clean up movies and TV, and those who produce it.
What they do here at a company called ClearPlay is create filters for DVD players that will temper the violence, hide the sex, and mute the swear words.(Video clip from MATRIX REVOLUTIONS): The only way you're getting through this door is over my big dead (muted word)!
SEVERSON: This is the edited version of MATRIX REVOLUTIONS. Bill Aho is the CEO of ClearPlay, and he says his filters allow viewers to customize movies and delete what they find offensive.
WILLIAM AHO (CEO, ClearPlay): We give you 14 different categories, which allows for something like 16,000 different permutations [so] that you can customize how you view this movie to your personal tastes.
SEVERSON: As you can imagine, editing Hollywood movies without the permission of the filmmakers and studios has them in an uproar, but what ClearPlay is doing is legal -- at least until the new Family Movie Act the president signed into law in April is tested in court.
Mr. AHO: The Family Movie Act says that it's okay for families in the privacy of their homes to skip or mute over sections of movies using technology like ClearPlay's, which simply allows you to preprogram, to choose with a regular DVD that [you're] going to skip this kind of violence or, say, this kind of sex or nudity or language.SEVERSON: Aho lobbied hard for the Family Movie Act and hopes to make a lot of money from his company's software, which he says is already selling in all 50 states. And his is not the only business that hopes to cash in.
RAY LINES (Founder, CleanFlicks): There's a large market of people out here that want edited movies to watch. Hollywood doesn't provide them, and so we provide them.
SEVERSON: Ray Lines is the founder of CleanFlicks, which is different from ClearPlay in that Lines's company physically edits the movies and then sells the edited versions throughout the country, particularly in the South. He also requires that customers purchase an original version. He hopes that will protect him from violating copyright laws.
Mr. LINES: By the time you pay $19.95 for an original copy and then another $14 for our edited version, you know, you're into this thing $35, and that's expensive. But amazingly, there are people that want this so bad they are willing to pay the price.SEVERSON: Lines says there were 125 "F" words in the popular movie GOOD WILL HUNTING, which was rated R. Romantic comedies are the most difficult to edit. He says action movies like DIE HARD, LETHAL WEAPON, and TROY are the easiest.
Mr. LINES This is a scene out of the movie TROY, okay? Brad Pitt, you know, his character, has been summoned to kill the giant or whatever. All we do here is just before the sword goes in, you know, we would just find another shot -- use that as a cutaway. You see, the point we would make here is that you still see the guy dies, you still see that Brad Pitt killed him, and so you don't really take away from the story of what's going on.
SEVERSON: CleanFlicks even edits family films like SHREK.(To Mr. Lines): You mean there's violence in SHREK? There's swear words in SHREK?
Mr. LINES: Absolutely, yeah, and that's one of the frustrating things, is Hollywood will make a movie that suppose to be a kid's movie, but there's profanity in it and there's swear words or there's crude humor, for example. And so these are the things that parents ask us to take out for them.
TIFFANY BURBIDGE: It's very important. We don't rent from anywhere else. We only come here.
Professor PAUL CAMPOS (University of Colorado School of Law): I think most of us would recognize that it would certainly be very, very problematic and quite obviously illegal for me, for example, to republish, say, a Harry Potter book with significant alterations to the dialogue and to the prose and the others aspects of it without the author's permission and then sell this revised version of Harry Potter for profit.
Prof. HOOVER: Yes, whether they consider themselves to be religious or not and whether they consider themselves to be religiously conservative or liberal or not. They all watch pretty much the same stuff.
Prof. HOOVER: But the industry does have a point when it says, "The switch is on our end." And if we're not changing the channels, if we're watching the stuff, and they're making money showing it, they're going to keep doing that. And that's the curious conundrum that we face at this point in time.
