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Movie Filtering Company Is Told To Shut Down

By Amanda Bronstad
January 01, 2017

A start-up that provides a technology that filters movies for profanity, violence and other objectionable content has vowed to take a copyright battle against Hollywood all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court after a federal judge granted an injunction blocking its service.

The injunction, sought by several of Hollywood's largest studios, ordered Provo, UT's VidAngel Inc., founded in 2013, to effectively shut down — though the service was still operating several days later. In his order, U.S. District Judge André Birotte of the Central District of California found that VidAngel violates the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by using a software to “circumvent a technological measure” designed to protect copyrighted movies and TV shows. Disney Enterprises, Inc. v. VidAngel Inc., 2:2016cv04109.

“VidAngel has not offered any evidence that the plaintiffs have either explicitly or implicitly authorized DVD buyers to circumvent encryption technology in order to view the DVD on a different platform such as VidAngel's streaming service,” the district judge wrote.

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