The Directors' Guild of America and several movie studios have finally decided to take on companies who are renting and selling films with modified and "sanitized" content, as well as software companies that are developing and selling software that can perform digital modification of film content. While this `creative editing' has been quietly occurring for at least two years, apparently the film industry has decided that it is time to draw a line in the sand. According to Jay Roth, the National Director of the Directors' Guild of America, "This is not about an artist getting upset because someone dares to tamper with their masterpiece. This is fundamentally about artistic and creative rights and whether someone has the right to take an artist's work, change it and then sell it." Film director Michael Apted points out, "You don't know what version of a film you're buying, ...if people can take out stuff and do what they want with it and then sell it...." Hollywood writer, film director and producer Marshall Herskovitz laments that, "We're just beginning to understand that this is part of a wider issue. As long as something exists as digital information, it can be changed. So, as a society, we have to come to grips with what the meaning of intellectual property will be in the future." And to the film studios, the concern is with copyright and branding protection.

A chain of video companies, based mainly in Utah and Colorado, have been renting and selling edited video tapes and DVDs of top selling films that are marketed as "clean" versions of these films without much notice. But what appears to have set off a three-alarm alert is Trilogy Studios of Utah's software, MovieMask, a filtering software that can be downloaded to a viewer's computer, laptop and DVD player. MovieMask took its editing software on a promotional tour to the Hollywood studios recently, and the studios were shocked by the sophisticated capabilities of this software. MovieMask allows film viewers to choose the dynamics to be edited in a film by blocking unwanted scenes and language, and can creating over 36 different edited versions of the film, in addition to allowing the viewer to view the film in its original, unedited version. An owner of several Colorado CleanFlicks stores, a company that rents modified films, has filed a legal action against sixteen Hollywood directors, including Steven Spielberg, claiming that CleanFlicks is providing a legal service, and that a purchaser of a piece of art can do whatever they want with it since they own it.

The filing of the lawsuit has awakened the sleeping film studios, which have previously been reluctant to enter the fray. But they apparently have decided that enough is enough. As one studio executive quipped, "If you're a studio that's spent a lot of money developing a `Spider-Man' brand, do you want to dilute it by having a `Spider Man Lite' on the market to compete with it?" And to add further insult to injury, MovieMask has reportedly entered into a contract with a product placement company to allow products to be inserted into the content of existing films, with products customized by viewing region.

Let the games begin.