Hollywood snubs 44% of public

If you were a businessman and you knew that 44 percent of the American public would buy or rent a certain product if you made slight changes to it, you would probably give it to them.

What business doesn't give the public what it wants? What business doesn't live by the creed that the customer is always right?

Hollywood, it turns out. Responding to a suit filed by moviemakers, a federal judge ruled recently that it is a violation of the federal copyright law to edit movies for obscene content.

Joanne Moulton, who at one time owned a half-dozen Play It Clean stores around Utah until lawsuits dried them up one by one, was given five days to pack up her last store.

"Everyone wins," says Moulton of the edited movie business. "Hollywood makes millions on this industry and the public gets what it wants. I feel like I've been on a mission. This was about viewers' rights. And viewers lost."

Thus ends a contentious, bitter three-year battle with Hollywood that raised a number of sticky issues about rights for artists and art owners. U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch ruled that edited objectionable scenes cause "irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies."

Putting the phrase of "creative artistic expression" to most Hollywood fare is like calling Big Macs "cuisine." For every "Crash" and "Traffic," there are dozens of movies like "Con Air," "Friday the 13th," "Anger Management" and anything with Sharon Stone and Vin Diesel in it. Try calling those "art."

Anyone with eyes can see that Hollywood's use of swear words, nudity and gore goes beyond "artistic expression." Or don't you find it funny that "artistic expression" consists of precisely one F-word, which, not coincidentally, is the exact dosage allowed to earn a PG-13 rating.

An ABC News poll in 2005 showed 44 percent of Americans favored editing; 39 percent said that, given the choice, they'd "likely" rent edited movies, and 20 percent — which represents more than 40 million people — said they'd "very likely" rent such movies.