When I was in high school (in a small California city with a large Mormon population), our local Christian book/video store would perform this service, but only on individual tapes that the customers brought in.

The fact that some business owners thought it would be legal to buy one tape, copy it several times, and then sell or rent those copies without paying a licensing fee... sort of delusional. On the other hand, maybe someone should step up and teach these folks about the wonders of anonymous bit-torrent services. :)

I grok the creators rights argument, but I do, for instance, wish that there were a version of Titanic that didn't include the car hump. Which is sort of gratuitous in any case.

Yo in my world Consumer's rights > Creator's rights no question

I get that there's an issue with the middle-party / unlicensed distributor thing though.

There was an interesting case here in Sweden where the highest court fined a TV station for interrupting movies with commercial breaks. Directors Claes Eriksson and Vilgot Sjöman sued the channel for spoiling their artistic visoon with those abrupt commercial breaks. And won!

Put that in your consumer pipe and smoke it.

Good thing the droit d'auteur stuff is much more prevalent in Europe. *forwards swedish dude's precious movie*

i bet cleanfix would be able to chop ten minutes out of both of those movies, yaknow, being Swedish and all there's a topless lady here, a bit of sex there.... ;))

also, win;

had unprecedented access to dozens of renegade stores and their owners, including the infamous Daniel Thompson, who was arrested for statutory rape after supposedly paying underage girls for sexual favors in his edited movie store (at least he had a screenwriters sense of irony).

Yeah, I have to say that if some yokel was re-editing my work to make it "acceptable" I'd sue him into atoms.