Fair Use or not Fair Use?

A recent court ruling outlaws the practice of reselling and/or renting "clean" versions of movies.

I'm sort of ambivalent about the whole "fair use" vs. copyright debate, generally. On the one hand, we all stand on the shoulders of giants, not mice. And even more, once I buy something, shouldn't I have some rights of consumption? (And how many times can I really be expected to buy Star Wars?)

On the other hand, creators deserve to prosper and profit from the expression of their form, be it art, craft or otherwise.

The particular case in question, though, seems pretty clear: you can't take people's work, change it, and resell it. That's seems to clearly cross ethical and legal boundaries.

It get much murkier when you're not talking about reselling, but modifying your OWN copy of some asset, or even overlaying (in realtime) the edit-streams necessary to "clean" up a movie, as Clearplay does. That seems legit, again both ethically and legally - its fair use.

I guess I'd feel better if, at heart, this was actually a debate about creators and the nurturing of arts and sciences, and less so about the corporate dollar squeeze.