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Because there's a difference between a license to distribute and a license to edit. If these guys openly bought to re-distribute (legal distribution license) then they were never considered the final owners, being as they weren't the final owners they had no legal right to edit because within the definitions of copyright law they never owned the movie, they merely held them waiting for someone else to pay them for it.

So, legally speaking, everything would be A-OK if the customer first bought a copy of the unedited movie, then stepped over into a different line in the same store to submit that copy to the editing department, to be picked up in a few hours? That way, the legal owner of the movie would be asking for the service.

If that's the case, what a screwed up system. The actions are all exactly the same, performed by the same actors, just shifted in time a bit.

Isn't the Law replete with Kafkaesque conundrums like that though? It's legal to make a map. It's legal to compile crime statistics of various neighborhoods. However if you combine the two and try to make a map color coded based on crime statistics...Redlining!

It's not just a matter of shifting time, it's a matter of who owns what when. Ownership is and always will be 9/10 of the law, you're not allowed to modify that which you do not own, and within the distribution structure of copyrighted material the store doesn't own it while they're trying to sell it (they own the physical copy, but not the copyrighted material on it). It's not screwed up, it's just complicated.