The Director's Guild of America has brought a countersuit against several companies that make DVD playback software because the DGA doesn't like the way they play their material (the original suit involved ClearPlay, Movie Mask and Family Shield companies suing 15 directors because they wouldn't allow their films to be used this way). ClearPlay, et. al. don't actually alter the DVD, just the play back so that parents can control their children's viewing of a movie. "They are taking films and using technology to alter them without permission from either their directors or their copyright holders," says DGA President Martha Coolidge. It's understandable that artists would not like new technologies that are able to automatically alter copyrighted artistic expression. And yet it's also clear that people want an easy way to filter their own viewing at times. But the ClearPlay creators are making filtering decisions in the architecture of the code, which might invisibly takes away the choice from the viewer.

On the other hand, Peter Rojas writes in the Village Voice that this may empower the masses to take up fan editing as in these examples:

"The Phantom Edit, a Jar Jar Binks-less cut of The Phantom Menace, and A.I.: The Kubrick Edit, a decidedly darker Stanley Kubrick-inspired version of the Spielberg movie. After poring over whatever notes and articles he could find to get an idea of what the legendary director might have done with the material, DJ Hupp, a filmmaker in Sacramento, California, changed the ending and clipped out about 30 minutes of what he thought were the film's more sentimental and lighthearted moments. (Both fan edits can be found on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like Kazaa and Gnutella.)"

He goes on to say:
"Should CleanFlicks prevail, an interesting precedent could be established in which anyone can do what they want with somebody else's film or song and sell it to the public as long as there is one paid copy extant for each copy manipulated. The myth of creative control would be shattered, something that would legitimize the creative output of thousands who use the films and music of others as raw material for their own work."

It seems as though some sort of authoring control ought to be retained, if the "author's" name (in the case of films, the author is the director) is attached. However, the idea that consumers can take content and do what they want with it for their own personal use is also very appealing for the masses. In the end, maybe there will be DVD's containing both the original, together with a consumer's choice of fan edits or filtered versions, in some sort of customized arrangement, that would satisfy both the author's need to keep an original together with the consumer's choice of edited versions.