Modern film censorship : Television, airlines, and home entertainment.

Motion pictures have always faced criticism for threatening moral values.

In 1934 the MPPDA created the Production Code Administration and gave it the authority to approve or reject all studio productions.

The practice of censoring films for television commenced while the Production Code was still in operation.

Motion picture studios edited, dubbed, and altered films for television and even based its own content standards on the Code.

As movies moved out of theaters and onto television, they also worked their way onto airplanes.

Careful to make sure that the airline audience would feel comfortable with the films offered, the airline industry instituted its own code to govern the content of motion pictures.

As movies on the VCR, DVD player, and computer came to occupy the centerpiece of American home entertainment, concerns over moral content again emerged.

Filmmakers and studios were left vulnerable and divided over new technologies, ancillary markets, residuals payments, and artistic rights.

These divisions were further exacerbated by the contention over motion picture colorization, and from demands outside the industry for more family-friendly entertainment by Cardinal Roger Mahony of the Los Angeles Archdiocese, film critic Michael Medved, and the Dove Foundation.

In the midst of these divisions, companies such as CleanFlicks, MovieMask, Family Flix, and ClearPlay emerged as a new wave of censors willing to remove offensive content from Hollywood films for financial gain.

As these entrepreneurial censors threatened the industry from without, the Directors Guild of America and the studios brought suit against them to stem the tide of modern film censorship.

In the end, nearly all parties involved lost in the legal battle.

Congress, however, intervened and with the passage of the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005, ClearPlay was exempted from the lawsuit and emerged as the only active film censor for profit.