CleanFlix will take your dvd and replace it with another that removes all the dirty language. Needless to say they got sued for copyright violation and lost. There is a bunch of good commentary about this, I'm just going to link to it:

Ed Felten

Tim Lee (he has a series of updates as well)

You can traceback other posts from there. The bottom line - no one seems to think this is a particularly good idea, although it may be the correct interpretation of the law. For myself, I'm wondering how the judge's view of copyright law

The argument [that CleanFlicks has no impact or a positive impact on studio revenues] has superficial appeal but it ignores the intrinsic value of the right to control the content of the copyrighted work which is the essence of the law of copyright.

squares with the U.S. Constitution which allows these monopolies solely

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts

His view is that people are more likely to create things if they can control the subsequent content of the work? That seems absurd.

I would have said that a redacted copy was a copyright infringement. For the judge to claim it wasn't, essentially means that anyone can copy anything as long as they miss a bit out here and there, e.g. 10 microseconds of silence between each track of a CD. Very strange.

As for it being a a violation of the artist's moral right to the integrity of their work, I really only see that very important right coming into play when a redacted work of theirs is misrepresented as that of the original artist, whether by explicit misattribution or implicit (omission of warning).

So, as long as the redacted copy of the DVD tends not to be confused by the audience as an original, unbowdlerised version, then no moral right to integrity would be violated. This could be achieved by visual or audio cues.

My (admittedly imperfect) understanding of the ruling is that he ruled that redaction is a copyright infringement.

I don't think the issue here was with copies except in the technical sense that the courts have concluded that you can sell a book (doctrine of first sale) but you can't make an identical copy, burn the original and then sell the copy. Cleanflix doesn't seem to have been increasing the number of copies in circulation, but removed a copy for every "redacted" copy they provided.

Perhaps they were hoping to claim the existence of an ephemeral, albeit redacted copy in the process of transmitting the original DVD to the purchaser? Perhaps in the same way that a prudish ISP might redact copies of copyrighted web pages in the process of transmitting them to their customers.

However, I'm sure the judge in such a case would require precise continuity (contagion) between the original DVD and the redacted DVD, i.e. no master copy. The original would indeed have to be demonstrated as ephemeral - destroyed.

The thing about DVDs is that the derivative can still contain the original movie, but disable the menu option that plays it - and add a new menu option that plays the redacted version (contains instructions that tell the DVD player which bits of the original to skip).

But all this punditry is like physicists conjecturing how many black holes you should be legally permitted to fit on the head of a pin - absolutely pointless, and, in the hindsight of a couple of decades hence, utterly ridiculous.