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."

Comments

How will he defend it...

[simm1701]

If it does go to court it will be interesting to see how he travels to defend it.

iirc he is on the US no fly list plus a couple of terrorist watch lists... (something to do with organisational affiliations I think)

... still more ...

[thermopile]

Still more can be found here, on Damn Interesting, which provides an entertaining read on the things he claims to have done, and the efforts to debunk them. From what I've read, they haven't ALL been debunked.

His spoon covered cadillac, however, is laughable.

Geller is in the UK

[HuskyDog]

I am a supporter of EFF but having read the compaint, I am (as usual) a little confused. It says that both Geller and his company are based in the UK (paras 4 and 5) and then goes on to say that the court has jurisdiction (para 8). Isn't this going to end up rather like the SpamHaus case but possibly with better management from the UK end?

I can see how the EFF might prevail with relief A (declaratory judgment) and possibly B (injunctive relief) although its not clear what would happen if Geller broke the injunction. Would that be a criminal offence for which he could be extradited? But reliefs C to F all seem to boil down to Geller handing over some money. What is going to happen when the court rules against him and he ignores them?

So far as I can see, YouTube shouldn't have had to accept a DMCA takedown request from outside the USA in the first place. Perhaps they didn't have to? Does the DMCA say anything about this? What's to stop some bored teenager from (for example) China sending dozens of takedown notices every day in the certain knowledge that no-one can stop him?

Re:More on this....

[smellsofbikes]

I agree with the direction of your post, but there are some ... let's call them clarifications.

1. Joseph Smith, not John, was the one with the hat. 1a. It wasn't the hat that was magic, it was a stone, that he dug up and PUT in the hat, and then he'd stick his face in the hat and the stone would talk to him and he'd say what the stone told him to, so that his loyal amanuensis could write it all down.

2. Most Quakers these days aren't so into the crazies. Shakers were but they're mostly extinct. Likewise, most Southern Baptists and their crowd don't do the shaking and speaking-in-tongues (glossolalia, it's called) and handling snakes and other weird things like that: many consider those to be sinful. Pentecostals, however, are WAY into the shaking and the gibbering.

A lot of religious Christian types absolutely do believe in big, world-affecting miracles, at least in the past: many of them will tell you earnestly that NASA had to repeatedly recalibrate the Apollo landings to account for a missing day -- but not quite a full day, because two different time-stop miracles are described in the Bible. They're thorough, even if the whole idea of weird time issues thousands of years ago would have any relevance whatsoever on the Earth/Moon system being ludicrious. (Of course, it's not ludicrous if there was a defined start time, at which the Earth and Moon were created like they are -- which they believe -- but it is if the E/M system is a few billion years old and doesn't really have a discernable start.)