"Right but the idea put forth was you send your legal copy of a DVD to someone else to modify for you. Since they don't own that legal copy they would have to take steps to ensure they do not maintain a copy of the DVD. Basically the company would have to make it as if you were making it yourself, ie all copies of the original would either have to be destroyed or given back to you."
But that was not the situation before this court, was it?
Besides all that, I doubt very much that anyone would be willing to pay the cost of having this done on a custom basis. If the duplicator, on the other hand, was reproducing a bowdlerized copy from a master it had previously created, then it would be making unauthorized copies.
The economics of re-editing each video sent in just don't work out, given the time involved in that process.
Now, the idea of the DVD player that would read a database and automatically skip certain portions of a film is just fine under the copyright laws. Indeed, the database itself could be protected by copyright, since it would be an original work.
That seems to be the way to go with this, plus it would be loads cheaper, and the data could be downloaded very quickly from some service.
Since you can't actually alter a commercial DVD without making a copy of it, I think the third-party thing isn't going to hold up.
Right, we're on a tangent discussion, related to but not directly involved in the court case in question.
Actually it probably wouldn't be too hard. You could create editing software to do the grunt work for you, and hook it up to a database that would have all your edits pre-programmed for movies you've already figured out what to edit. So there'd be a large labor overhead the first time movie X came in, but every time after that it would be easy. Then it would burn a copy of the modified movie, delete all temp files, and send both the original and the sanitized burn back to the user. Could probably do the whole thing with less than 1 man hour for any movie in the database, of course you're probably talking 5 or 6 man hours (or days for one of those Andy Warhol 10 hour movies) for every movie new to the DB.
The third party would have to make sure their methods are REALLY clean, temp files deleted after the copy is made, temp files unavailable to any person or process other than the copying program while the editing is being done, and a massive audit trail to prove it all. Might not be cost effective, but the tangent discussion was really about the legality, not the intelligence.