Is it fair use to electronically modify a movie to omit objectionable content?
No. In Clean Flicks of Colorado, LLC v. Soderbergh, a U.S. District court held that editing movies by deleting ?sex, nudity, profanity and gory plots” is a violation of copyright law. In Clean Flicks, editing techniques included redaction of audio content, replacement and redaction with ambient noise, “blending” of audio and visual content to provide transition of edited scenes, cropping, fogging, or the use of a black bar to obscure visual content. The Court analyzed the four factors described above, finding that that the edited films were not “transformative” because they added nothing new to the movies; rather, they simply deleted scenes and dialogue from them. While the companies argued that there was no adverse effect on the market from their use of the movies because they purchased an original copy each time they edited a copy, the Court found that this argument ignored the intrinsic value of the right to control the content of the copyright work which is the essence of the law o
