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The “Innocence of Muslims” is Back in Court
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On December 16, 2014 @ 11:35 am In The Point | 18 Comments
This was the movie that Obama tried to blame his intelligence failure on. This was the movie whose producer Hillary promised to send to jail. (And did.) It’s also the movie that Obama told Google to take down. Google to its credit refused. A Federal judge issued a bizarre ruling claiming that an actress in the movie could get it taken down because the movie was unprofessional. His decision is now being challenged.
An 11-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena will hear arguments Monday by Google, which owns YouTube, disputing the court’s decision to remove “Innocence of Muslims” from the popular video sharing service.
A divided three-judge panel ruled in February that actress Cindy Lee Garcia had a copyright claim to the 2012 video because she believed she was acting in a much different production than the one that appeared.
Garcia was paid $500 for a movie called “Desert Warrior” she believed had nothing to do with religion, but ended up in a five-second scene in which her voice was dubbed over so her character asked if Muhammad was a child molester.
“These, of course, are fighting words to many faithful Muslims and, after the film aired on Egyptian television, there were protests that generated worldwide news coverage,” Judge Alex Kozinski wrote in the 2-1 opinion. “While answering a casting call for a low-budget amateur film doesn’t often lead to stardom, it also rarely turns an aspiring actress into the subject of a fatwa.”
Google argued that the copyright was owned by filmmaker Mark Basseley Youssef, who wrote the script, managed the production and dubbed over Garcia’s dialogue.
A dissenting judge said Garcia played no creative role that would give her ownership rights.
Until the court order, YouTube had rejected calls by President Barack Obama and other world leaders to pull the video, arguing that it would amount to government censorship and violate free speech protections.
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.
The case is a no-brainer.
Kozinski made up his own law with no actual grounds. Meanwhile the Obama blame game has died down to such an extent that even the New York Times is willing to join in on the side of free speech. The appeals court will likely reverse. But the real issue is still the fact that a man was sent to jail for making a movie and that the administration actually told YouTube to take it down.
This is a topic we ought to be talking about, but the media refuses to have a serious discussion about the implications of it even if they have very belatedly now come out on the side of free speech.
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