US & World

YouTube ordered to take down anti-Muslim film

A screenshot from a trailer for controversial anti-Islam film,
A screenshot from a trailer for controversial anti-Islam film, "Innocence of Muslims."
sinahi tenurche/YouTube

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Other filmmakers can protect themselves from a similar situation.

"For the most part, Hollywood filmmakers protect themselves from this sort of situation with a variety of mechanisms," Loyola Law School professor Jay Dougherty​ told KPCC. "The people involved in making the films are employees of the film, or they're independent contractors where there is proper paperwork done so that the filmmaker or production company would be the owner of the film."

"This was a highly unusual circumstance," Dougherty said. "This woman may have given the filmmaker some kind of license to use her performance, but what happened here that makes it different from the typical Hollywood film is that he actually made something very different from what she had been led to believe apparently."






"I'm a strong believer in a vigorous first amendment," Dougherty​ told KPCC, "and if this was someone trying to stop the message​ of this individual, this filmmaker — in other words an anti-Muslim message — stopping it on many other grounds might violate the First Amendment."

But it wasn't that simple.

"The situation here as Judge [Alex] Kozinski  saw it though, was that when you have a copyright infringement, courts for the most part find that there is no direct First Amendment defense. In fact, copyright is 'the engine of free expression,' is the term some of the courts have used," Dougherty said.




