After making an unsuccessful
attempt of last week to convince a California state judge to order YouTube
to remove the movie trailer, Cindy Lee Garcia, the actress in the anti-Muslim film “Innocence of Muslims”
refiled her case in federal court on Wednesday. In the Wednesday's filing, Garcia added copyright claims to her suit of unfair business practices, fraud and slander.
She also demands the YouTube to take down the 14-minute trailer for the film. According
to her pleadings in the suit, it is stipulated that YouTube cannot couch itself in the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act because the company did not remove the
video, even though the copyright owner, Garcia, demanded such removal. She’s also suing the hundreds of people who have reposted the video on YouTube.
A representative for YouTube didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
This is a strange case, wherein, someone is trying to prove that by acting in a film and “authoring”
a performance, she is entitled to a slice of the copyright. Typically,
actors do not bring forth this type of lawsuit because, especially in
Hollywood, they sign release forms before working. Such an agreement grants producers
various rights.
Some of those rights include freedom from libel claims. Such rights disallow actors from attempting to halt both the distribution and
presentation of a film.
Garcia’s lawyer, says that the only
thing her client signed was a document that would authorize Garcia’s
participation in the film on the Internet Movie Database, a film content
site.
Prior to re-filing the lawsuit, Armenta registered Garcia’s performance
at the U.S. Copyright Office. In her registration, Garcia noted that she
delivered “a dramatic performance and it was fixed to film,” versus a
work specifically made to hire, and thus she became a copyright holder.
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