Innocence of Muslims Copyright Claim Back in Court

The online fate of the bizarre,
terrible little anti-Muslim film called Innocence of
Muslims is up for debate again today. It would have been
considered camp if it hadn’t been blamed by the Obama
Administration for terrorism and Mideast violence (including the
deadly assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya).

The movie has been forced off YouTube not because of these
invocations of terrorist agitation, but rather over an unusual
copyright claims. The actors who were in the movie say they were
deceived and filmed a movie called Desert Warrior, only to
have their lines dubbed over with anti-Muslim propaganda. One
actor, Cindy Lee Garcia, sued to force the movie off the Internet,
making an unusual copyright claim. She claimed copyright ownership
of her own performance, and therefore demanded the video be taken
down. Google, owner of YouTube is resisting, but earlier in the
year a split federal appeals court panel, led by Judge Alex
Kozinski, accepted Garcia’s copyright argument, even though she was
paid for her short performance and was not the filmmaker. Now it’s
before the full court.

Experts think the ruling is unlikely to stand and creates some
bad precedents on the way to trying to be kind to Garcia, who has
received death threats over her small role in the short 
video. From the
Associated Press:

Google is supported in its appeal by an unusual alliance that
includes filmmakers, Internet rivals such as Yahoo and prominent
news media companies such as The New York Times that don’t want the
court to infringe on First Amendment rights.

Garcia has support from the Screen Actors Guild and the American
Federation of Musicians.

If the court upholds the smaller panel’s ruling, YouTube and
other Internet companies could face takedown notices from others in
minor video roles.

Alex Lawrence, a copyright and intellectual property lawyer in
New York not connected with the case, said he thinks the court will
reverse the earlier ruling because the judges reached a decision to
give Garcia some relief on thinly grounded law.

“There’s a lot of sympathy for Miss Garcia,” Lawrence said. “She
got paid $500 and received death threats. Everyone feels sympathy
for her, but using copyright in this way is a real problem for a
lot of industries.”

In March, Jerry Brito noted the problematic precedent that could
be set if the ruling in favor of Garcia stands. He noted, “If this
decision is allowed to stand, it will encourage actors everywhere
to begin to assert separate copyrights over their performances in
films in which they have appeared.” Read more
here.