This is a very interesting topic! I'm glad we're discussing it here. It's not fan editing, but it is editing of a sort.
I do hope the trend continues that Sony is starting (in a sense. As
DigModiFicaTion aptly noted, this may be in response to the VidAngel kerfuffle).
I remember my frustration when the first live-action
Transformers movie came out. I had been wanting to see a live-action TF movie since I was 9 and holding Optimus Prime in my hands for the first time. I had a nephew that was 7 at the time, and he would have loved to have seen it, too...but there were pornography and masturbation jokes in it. And these jokes didn't move the plot forward, so they could be easily excised. It bothered me that I couldn't bring my 7-year-old nephew to see a movie about big toy robots. (And I don't think I was fully aware of fan editing as a hobby at that point.)
Granted, not every film would work equally well for a family-film treatment. I'm sure that there are TV versions of the
American Pie movies, but is there any point to having a version squeaky clean that little kids can watch? It would probably be two minutes long, and it wouldn't give the viewer any idea of what the movie was about or why people liked it. It's possible to have a slightly less violent version of
Jaws that still includes the immortal line "We're gonna need a bigger boat," but there's no way to have a clean version of
American Pie that includes the infamous "band camp" line.
And I appreciate the fact that the original films are packaged with the clean versions. As much as I get excited about having family-friendly versions, I also believe in freedom of expression (of course). This plan seems to hit the right balance of making multiple options available for viewing.
I've also been watching the VidAngel case unfold, and will continue to look for updates on this intriguing case. It sounds like they actually have some merits to their side of things, but if they've released
another filter without waiting for the first case to finish and without the studios' approval, it seems like they're needlessly stirring up trouble. There are options such as ClearPlay that haven't riled up the studios like this. Anyway, it'll be fascinating to see how this all plays out.