*** Welcome to piglix ***

CleanFlicks


CleanFlicks, founded in Utah in 2000, was a business that produced edited versions of films to remove content which the company considered inappropriate for children or that viewers might otherwise find offensive. CleanFlicks removed sexual content, profanity, some references to deity, and some violence from movies, either by muting audio or clipping entire portions of the track.

A 2006 court ruling closed the company. On March 13, 2007, CleanFlicks reopened its website with "Movies You Can Trust." While legally enjoined from offering edited movies, an email sent by the company on that date indicated that they had reviewed "tens of thousands" of movies and compiled over 1000 that meet their "family-friendly criteria." In January 2013, the CleanFlicks.com website was no longer online.

An announcement of intention to sue on the DGA website caused CleanFlicks to preemptively file in Denver Federal Court in August 2002. Robert Huntsman, an attorney and inventor affiliated with Cleanflicks who had a DVD-editing patent pending, was named as the lead plaintiff, so the original short caption for the case was Huntsman v. Soderbergh. In their suit, Cleanflicks sought a judgment that edited content was legal under federal copyright law. In addition to Steven Soderbergh, named defendants included Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford, Sydney Pollack, Robert Altman, John Landis, and Martin Scorsese. Although the chain had been operating for two years, the issue was brought to the spotlight when MovieMask made a series of demonstrations around Hollywood in March of that year. The directors' counter-suit soon followed, but the legal battle stretched on for years.

On July 6, 2006, a federal judge in Denver ruled that CleanFlicks' editing violated U.S. copyright laws. The judge ordered the company to "stop producing, manufacturing, creating, and renting" edited movies, and to hand all inventory to movie studios within five days of the ruling. The court gave the company more time than the ruling's initial five-day deadline for turning over the stock of edited movies, since CleanFlicks needed more time to receive movies which were still out on rental.


...
Wikipedia

...