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Electronic Frontier Foundation Sues Uri Geller
reversible physicist writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sued spoon-bender Uri Geller for using 'baseless copyright claims' to silence critics who question his paranormal powers. Brian Sapient posted on YouTube a 14-minute excerpt from the 1993 PBS NOVA program 'Secrets of the Psychics,' in which skeptic James Randi says Geller's spoon-bending feats were simple tricks. YouTube took down the video after Geller complained — his lawyers claim that 10 seconds of the video are owned by Geller. A shorter excerpt of the video is still up on YouTube."
Theres a bit more on this on http://www.badpsychics.co.uk/ and its forums. Well worth a read IMHO!
My web domain.
Randi has a copy of the full videos on his website
http://www.randi.org/uri/index.html
He had a T.V Reality show here in the last season, and some of his tricks had been revealed including magnets he had pulled off his head and got caught. He's nothing more than magician.
Uri Geller is a joke on youtube
it should give you a proof or so just search there : Uri Geller.
Read and Comment at my BLOG
!!!
Generally, yes. In this case, most probably. It all depends on the nature of the use, including length, effect on the marketability of the original, and the nature of the use.
So if these 10 seconds happened to be the most amazing trick ever and would be the sole reason that people would buy his videos, and you used only those 10 seconds without any commentary at all, then there's a possibility it wouldn;t be fair use.
Penn and Teller did a show once where they showed the spoon bending trick, and other tricks that Geller does without mentioning his name. They just said "phonies" use those tricks to show that they're "psychic". They even said that they won't mention his name because he sues everyone. It was plainly obvious that they were targeting Geller since at the time of the show, Geller was suing some mathematician - can't remember his name now..
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The tape themselfes are owned by the channel on which it was shown, and AFAIK they released the show for fair use on its full length. Heck, the same tape is on randi.org. Geller cannot pretend to own the copyright on the tape, which is all the DMCA authorize him to take down. As for the trick, I do not see how you can coypright that, since there is prior art in the previous century.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Well, first of all I am also a UK citizen.
Now, as to your main point, whilst I agree with the main thrust, I think that you may have missed the key point. I think we all agree that if Uri Geller owns some copyright in some material and someone in the USA breaches that copyright in some way which doesn't constitute fair use then Geller can in principle sue them in the US courts for breach of copyright, but that is not the situation under debate.
The Bern convention does not extend copyright transnationaly in quite the way you are perhaps implying (i.e. completely equal rules everywhere). It lays down certain minimal requirements, but the details vary from country to country. The UK and USA are both signatories, but never the less there are differences in what is protected. Examples include the period of protection (50 years for music in the UK, significantly longer in the USA) and what exactly is defined as 'fair use' (in this latter case US rules seem to be rather less stringent). I agree however that Geller probably has the same right to sue in the USA as US citizens have.
But the key point here is that Geller is not suing anyone. He issued a DMCA takedown notice. A concept which I don't believe the Bern convention addresses at all. It may well be that anyone in the world is allowed to issue such a notice in the USA, but the presence of the Bern convention doesn't demonstrate that this is necessarily the case, hence my question. I suggest that it would be perfectly legal for the USA or any other country to have a DMCA like law which says "Only our citizens may issue takedown notices" without any fear of breaching the terms of the Bern convention, because those who were not citizens would still be able to exercise their Bern rights by initiating a conventional suit for copyright infringement.
On your final point, it has been discussed here on many previous occasions that extradition law only applies to criminal cases and not civil ones such as this. Hence my suggestion that breaching an injunction may be a criminal act (I don't know, IANAL) capable of invoking extradition proceedings.
Actually, he would just bend the crap out of the spoon beforehand, until the middle pivot point was flimsy enough to bend easily. I love this clip from the Tonight Show where Johnny Carson provides him with unaltered props and Uri refuses to perform a psychic phenomenon. Oh, it's introduced by Randi... Link