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The basic question here is this. Am I allowed to alter my personal copy of any copyrighted material? Yes or no?

Technically, no you're not, but it's unlikely anyone would bother prosecuting you for it.

If yes, then I also have the right to contract with someone else to alter my personal copy for me.

Except that you're not allowed to.

If no, the the next step is to outlaw DVD players with mute, FF, and skip scene buttons.

Invalid comparison. Muting, fast forwarding, or skipping a scene while playing a DVD does not *alter* the DVD.

Your only option is to turn it off and take out the disk.

No, there's also the option of not trying to pretend that muting the playback of your DVD violates any law, since it doesn't.

I know that sound nuts, but that is where this idiotic drek will lead us.

No, it isn't. There is a clear line between turning down the sound or skipping chapters on your playback and actually producing an altered copy of a copyrighted work.

And before you ask, yes, it would most likely be legal to produce a special DVD player that would skip certain sections during the playback of an UNALTERED DVD movie whenever it was played.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet (although I haven't read all 600+ replies in the thread) is that one of the key concerns in cases like this is that the "unauthorized versions" (i.e. altered copies) of films will give untold numbers of viewers a misleading impression of the director's work. "Cut" versions don't just cut out certain "objectionable" sights or sounds, they inevitably chop out parts of scenes or dialog which can leave plot holes, unexplained gaps in exposition, clumsy scene transitions, etc. etc. I think we've all been familiar with how "choppy" some films get when they end up on TV after numerous cuts for reasons of content or to fit into a timeslot, and that's when such cuts are done by professional editors -- the cuts made by the unauthorized "video cleanup" shops are even less likely to be done in a smooth or reasonable fashion.

So the filmmakers are rightly concerned about unknown numbers of chopped copies of unknown quality floating around until the end of time, giving untold numbers of viewers a false impression of the film. If this practice became widespread, it would be even worse, thus the need to nip it in the bud. Otherwise, lots of people who had seen nothing but a hacked version of the film would end up talking about it on the internet, and for example badmouthing it as being full of plot holes or hard to follow or choppy or poorly edited, etc., when actually those flaws weren't present in the original film, and were the fault of the "chop-shop" that tried to "clean it up". In short, unauthorized versions have a big potential to reflect badly on the studio and the filmmakers. Even people who realize they're watching an "edited" version will still tend to blame the original filmmakers if they find that the edited version they watched seems to suck. And the problem is compounded by the fact that many people who end up watching the film (say, at a friend's house or after buying a copy secondhand and not paying much attention to the "edited" label) won't even fully realize that it *is* an edited version. They'll just know that they watched "Titanic, by James Cameron", and give little if any thought to the fact that someone else had been fiddling with it before they watched it.

The filmmaker's position, like that of any artist in any medium, is that they made their work the best they could, take it or leave it -- it should be judged as is, and not reworked and represented by some other artist (or non-artist) who might have a different vision, nor do they want various "versions" floating around that they have no say in nor control over which might give viewers a false impression of the artist's actual product.