Last week, federal district judge Richard Matsch ruled that three Utah-based companies that provide PG-rated, edited versions of feature films are an "illegitimate business."

The quotes from Matsch in the CBC article are over the top.

Judge Richard P. Matsch decreed on Thursday in Denver, Colo., that sanitizing movies to delete content that may offend some people is an "illegitimate business."

The judge also praised the motives of the Hollywood studios and directors behind the suit, ordering the companies that provide the service to hand over their inventories.

"Their objective ... is to stop the infringement because of its irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies," the judge wrote. "There is a public interest in providing such protection."

The directors behind the suit included Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford and Martin Scorsese. There's no word on whether George Lucas was part of the lawsuit -- that would've been a hoot considering the "irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression" that he's done over the decades to the Star Wars movies.

Let's take a look at what these companies were doing: They were providing to consumers, with full knowledge of those consumers, movies that had violence, nudity and profanity edited out. In other words, they were doing what happens every time one of these movies appears on broadcast television.

They also weren't pirating the movies. For every edited movie they sold, they bought an unedited one from the studios.

The debate on this issue over at Slashdot was interesting -- especially for a community that usually is quick to come to the defense of fair use rights. A simple and to-the-point refutation of the judge's ruling comes from Raul654:

Result in a nutshell: If I own a DVD, I cannot pay someone to make a copy of that movie for me sans parts I might find offensive. It's not censorship, because *I'm the one asking him to do it for me*. But in yet another defeat for personal freedom (and another win for the moneyed interests), the courts have found that this is a violation of copyright law.

Personally, I've little problem tolerating the gratuitous violence, profanity and nudity in most movies. I'm relatively young and have become accustomed to it. However, there are quite a few good films that can easily be made accessible to people like my grandmother if we were just allowed a few modest snips.

I'd like to think that technology will allow us some legally acceptable way of accomplishing this goal, even if Judge Matsch's ruling is upheld on appeal.