July 11, 2006 | Sex & Society

Movie sanitizers ordered to stop

Imagine watching "Jarhead" without seeing Jake Gyllenhaal's ass, or "The Talented Mr. Ripley" without catching a glimpse of Jude Law's package. Sounds blasphemous, right? A federal judge thinks so, too, and has ruled illegal the editing of  "objectionable" content from DVDs by so-called "film sanitizers" in Utah.

U.S. District Judge Richard P. Matsch handed down his ruling last week in a case involving CleanFlicks, a Utah-based company that removes adult language, sex and violence from DVDs and VHS tapes -- and then sells the bowdlerized versions over the Internet to consumers and locally to video rental stores. Sixteen prominent directors, including Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford and Martin Scorcese, didn't like the idea of someone editing and reselling their works and so took CleanFlicks to court.

According to the Salt Lake City Tribune, Judge Matsch ruled that CleanFlicks' business is "illegitimate"  and said that editing movies hurts filmmakers, their copyrights and, ultimately, their free expression.

"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," director Michael Apted, president of the Director's Guild of America,  told the Tribune.

Matsch ordered CleanFlicks and several other companies to cease operations. Exempt from the ruling, however, is another Utah company, ClearPlay, which has developed technology in DVD players that edits movies on the fly as they play.

Despite the ruling against it, CleanFlicks says it has no plans to clean up its own act, and will  appeal. We think there should be a special punishment -- perhaps forced viewing of hardcore gay porn -- for anyone with the nerve to cut out Jake Gyllenhaal's luscious butt.

• Utah film sanitizers ordered to cut it [Salt Lake Tribune]