[TChris]

Very good decision.

How do you figure? A person doesn't have the right to censor their own, legal copy of a movie?

That's all these businesses do. You buy a legal copy of the movie and they perform the service of removing the offensive content for you. Just how, praytell, does that violate copyright law by any stretch of the law or imagination?

[discostu]

Problem is they turn around and distribute the edited content. You can edit stuff you own all you want, but you can't turn around and sell it. Heck the redistribution alone was a copyright violation even without the editing.

[Squawk 8888]

Because they are charging fees for it and therefore profit from the original work. If they did it for free then the studios would not have a case.

[Constitution Day]

I see others on this have already taken you to task re: your lack of knowledge about copyright law.

I feel no need to pile on. LOL!

[lepton]

That's all these businesses do. You buy a legal copy of the movie and they perform the service of removing the offensive content for you.

Is that was this is about?

If they are selling this service, but not the movie, then this seems fine.

[MineralMan]

"How do you figure? A person doesn't have the right to censor their own, legal copy of a movie?

That's all these businesses do. You buy a legal copy of the movie and they perform the service of removing the offensive content for you. Just how, praytell, does that violate copyright law by any stretch of the law or imagination?"

---

Actually, that's not what they do. They make a copy of the film, after editing it. Yes, they paid for the original copy.

However, copyright means exactly right. The owner of a copyright in an original work gets to control how the work is copied. That's where the copy part comes in, you see.

These guys are bowdlerizing someones work. If you don't know what that means, look up bowdlerize in Google. That is a violation of copyright.

The creator of a work, or his assigns, have the legal right to control the reproduction of that work. Period. No question about it. You have the right to purchase that work, if you wish, but you do not have the right to change it, copy it, then sell it again.

[Lord_Baltar]

If a person rips a DVD, edits it, then re-authors the DVD they are breaking the law.

If they charge someone money to do it, they are breaking the law.

Bottom line, what's being done is NOT simple editing. The companies (AKA Hackers) that are doing this are going out of their way to bypass copy protections built into the DVD (a violation of the law), duplicating the original DVD (another violation) converting the MPEG streams into a form they can edit (another violation) altering those streams (another violation) re-authoring the DVD, using some original elements (graphics for menus, etc) re-encoding (most likely doing a piss poor job of it with some cheap-cheesy software only encoder) then reburning the DVD, most likely with NO copy protections, or region codes, and then selling the resulting DVDs to their clients (another violation)

IMHO, the ONLY difference between people who do this, and the schmucks that sneak video cameras into a movie theater so they can sell bootleg copies of movies, is the holier than thou speeches about "Doing it for the Children".

Good Ruling! Now prosecute!