It will soon become legal to alter a motion picture so long as all the sex, profanity, and violence have been edited out, thanks to a bill called the Family Movie Act, an attachment to the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act approved Tuesday by the House. The Senate has already passed its own version, and the President is expected to sign it.
Overall, the bill is a big win for Hollywood, with significantly harsher penalties for common bootleggers. But the "family movie" provision, championed by US Representative Lamar Smith (Republican, Texas), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee"s Internet and Intellectual Property Subcommittee, indemnifies any company that makes prudish versions of movies available without authorization. File sharing will remain a crime, but so long as all the good parts have been purged, a sort of Puritanical bootlegging will be tolerated, if not encouraged.