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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.

What you propose is possible, but much more money could be made by creating the software, creating the database of edits and selling the database to users, to let them view or create a copy for themselves.

I expect such technology to be built into DVD players before long. You'd sign up for a service, download data for movies you wanted to butcher up, and everything would be automatic after that. Easy enough to create, certainly, and you'd be able to license the software to the DVD makers.

Oh, wait....betcha Sony is already working on such a thing in-house, so it's likely that all of our budding entrepreneur's efforts would go to waste.

If it's a good enough idea, it's already in the works, I'd think.