Provo's VidAngel strikes a deal to repay Hollywood studios whose copyrights it violated, dodging bankruptcy liquidation

I’ve been covering the saga of VidAngel, the Provo company that filters the naughty bits out of Hollywood movies and streams the “clean'“ versions to its customers, for awhile now.

It seemed like the end for VidAngel in 2019, when a California jury ordered the company to pay $62.4 million in damages to Hollywood studios — namely, Disney and Warner Bros. — for violating the studios’ copyrights and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act through the way it distributed its squeaky-clean versions of movies.

This week, VidAngel announced it reached a deal with those studios, cutting the payment to $9.9 million to be paid out over the next 14 years. VidAngel also agreed to drop its appeal of the original lawsuit, and to stop streaming any Disney and Warner Bros. movies.

If VidAngel had to pay the original judgment, it would have forced the company to liquidate, the CEO has said.

Read up on the latest — and possibly last — chapter in the VidAngel saga, here at sltrib.com. And read my Salt Lake Tribune story from 2018 that explains Utah’s tortured history with the R rating and movie-sanitization companies.