CleanFlicks Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Dagnabbit! CleanFlicks and other crazy film editing sites claim that they've found a loophole that allows them to edit Hollywood movies to take out all of that sin-worthy content. According to the company's website, they remove, in order -- profanity, graphic violence, nudity and sexual content. That might be enough to not take the company seriously, if simple collections of letters is considered the top thing to edit -- before violence. Their editing includes more than the flash of a nipple or a severed limb. The company's "selection criteria" also includes implied sexual content (unless that sexual content is by married individuals), a list of how many bad words there are (including "hell") and my very favorite: "jump scenes," otherwise known as "scenes which intend to unexpectedly startle the viewer." That's right, "BOO!" with a kid jumping out from around the corner could be considered inappropriate.

Now these kooks have decided that they have a legal right to hack movies to bits, even after a federal appeals judge ruled that the companies could no longer edit these films. In July of last year, Judge Richard P. Matsch had ruled that sanitizing movies on DVD or VHS violates federal copyright laws -- the assumed ending to a 3-year legal battle between the crazy companies and some Hollywood directors. Now, CleanFlicks and other such organizations are using the loophole that allows cinematic cuts for educational purposes. I'd really love to know how they consider this move educational. Have all of their customers -- half of whom are in the Land of the Mormons Utah -- made their homes educational institutions? If so, that's a lot of learnin' goin' on! Crazy kids... Good thing the company can't get its hands on the Bible. Methinks it would be a very small book if CleanFlicks and the like had their way.

A software-based company in San Francisco has released a new program that can censor DVDs on the fly. It uses an online movie database of existing "safe cuts," or you can upload your own. Their player then uses these cuts to generate a "cutlist," which plays the movie according to that list in real-time, effectively censoring it. This process does not create or leave behind a hard copy of the altered film, it edits everything in the background, splicing together a new version of the film as you watch it, leaving you with the original movie intact after viewing.

This differs from an earlier lawsuit against a company called CleanFlicks which was upheld in court because it was decided that they caused "irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies," by actually taking your DVD, and creating a "clean" copy of it with all the sex and profanity edited out. Basically, they sent you a duplicate that they created, with none of the bad stuff in it, meaning they physically alter the original movie content on the actual media.

Another company, ClearPlay, provides a similar service through a standalone DVD player that has filters built in to screen out portions of the movie the viewer finds objectionable. Since they don't change the movie itself, they have been safe from lawsuits, so far.

You've probably heard about companies like CleanFlicks, which edit popular movies on DVD to remove language and scenes that they find offensive, then rent or sell the "scrubbed" versions of the movies to customers and even to some video stores. Various Hollywood groups, including Mel Gibson, filed suit against these companies for violation of copyright laws. On Thursday, a federal appeals court judge ruled against CleanFlicks and similar companies, on the grounds that they  cause "irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies." The companies are ordered to turn over their inventory to movie studios within five days ... what do you think Hollywood will do with the sanitized DVDs? Unfortunately, DVDs don't burn well, so a celebratory bonfire is out.

The article on the ruling does not mention whether it will affect DVD players like ClearPlay that contain filters you can use to block certain types of content from specific movies. Since the actual DVD remains intact, this type of filtering might not be prohibited under the ruling. I believe the Family Movie Act that became law last year protects home technology like ClearPlay, as well.