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Uri Geller Accused of Bending Copyright Law
JagsLive writes in with a Fox News report about Uri Geller's apparently playing fast and loose with copyright law in order to silence his detractors. "'All it takes is a single e-mail to completely censor someone on the Internet,' said Jason Schultz, a lawyer for the online civil rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is suing Geller over an unflattering clip posted on YouTube for which he claimed a copyright ownership."
I think this is a dupe of a story from a few weeks ago but I read them both.
Nothing's wrong with entertaining people. But suing people over it is just being a fucktard. I read both articles, nothing's changed, he's still a fucktard. Hey, I calls 'em like I sees 'em.
There's a team of online bloggers trying to debunk a magician? Don't they have anything better to do? Come on, some people want to believe in magic, let them. Everyone else knows it's all slight of hand.
he should have seen that one coming.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
There is no spoon.
Maybe someone could sue him because of using fake rolex watches he bends.
Meh. What else is new. The guys in office are the same ones bought off to create these ridiculous laws in the first place.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
but if you bend it with your mind, Uri will come for you.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Abuse of the DMCA through fraudulent takedown notices should result in no less of a penalty than an actual violation of copyright. If a copyright owner can collect $150K per instance of copyright violation, then someone who fraudulently claims copyright on an item they do not in fact have a copyright on should be up against the same penalty.
Nobody would've cared 'bout the clip if Mr. Geller didn't make it popular this way...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Really? I'd like to see that trick. One email would prevent me from using any email account, newsgroups, web sites, IM, VPNs, etc.?
I suppose this is a bit of a shallow comment, but I love the Internet because when people do abusive things like Uri Geller and his unwarranted Youtube video removals, mass media will never/barely cover it. However the masses of the internet can show everyone what a tool Geller and others really are.
One solution that exists in the RIAA versus filesharer cases is that the RIAA has to provide a copyright registration certificate proving ownership of a song before they can proceed in court. Internet takedown notices should also require a certificate of copyright registration to accompany them. This one small step alone would likely stop 98% of the takedowns requested. While copyright itself does not require registration, if you don't care enough to register it, you shouldn't care enough to try to take it down afterwards.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
End transmission.
"You must realize the truth. There *is* no Copyright law."
-- Subvert the dominant paradigm. Repeat as desired. http://ownlifeful.com/
Looks like instead of the spoon, it's Uri that will be bent. Too bad he won't go to jail, I'd like to see him 'bend' out of that one =)
Fighting over religion is like seeing whose imaginary friend is best.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Oh, bullshit. If he actually owned the copyright, could demonsrate said ownership and evade the issue of "fair use," THEN I (a supporter of copyright in principle, but a believer that current law is way out of whack) would support Uri Geller. Since I believe that even if he does own the copyright in question, an 8-second clip being used as a demonstration of a hypothesis is, by definition, "fair use," I can believe in copyright and still call Geller out as a douche who is attempting to use misinterpreted (being generous) copyright law as a hammer against his critics.
No I mustn't. I can support fair use of small clips for things such as bonafide criticism of a performance. It is completely consistent with my stance on copyright to deride Geller's use of DMCA to muzzle those who would expose his methods. The case in point concerns 8 SECONDS of video. I call that fair use, consistent with my support of copyright law.
Just because you say it's so, don't make it so.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
It's funny. Some "psychics" genuinely seem to believe in their own "powers", apparently mistaking intuition and cold reading skills for ESP. But Geller is different. Not only is he a fraud, he knows he's a fraud. If Geller really believed in his "powers", he'd be trying to demonstrate them in laboratory conditions, if only to embarrass James Randi. But he doesn't believe in his "ability", so he lies and sues people, and thanks to his attempted censorship of this expose, more and more people have learned about his deceit.
What a sad way to live your life. All your achievements are fabrications, and you know that it's only a matter of time before even your most deranged fans realise they've been tricked. Where do you go from there? What are the job options for a notoriously fraudulent spoon bender?
Copyright law is pretty much designed to cause this sort of idiocy.
Re the ease of censoring on the net- It is quite scary how easily controlled most people's internet access (including my own, really) could be. People often think the internet is this robust, uncensorable system, because of old stories about being "designed to withstand a nuclear attack" and all that. That kind of applied when most network nodes were in universities and research labs, who were owner/operators of routing nodes with peering agreements with eachother. Nowadays, the vast majority of people on the internet are "edge nodes", connected to a single corporate ISP. So it's basically degenerated to a star/tree topology at the "home" level. No longer resistant to control, in fact facilitating control by establishing choke points. Blind, complacent faith in the "power" of the internet to "interpret censorship as damage and route around it" as the adage used to go, when that power is being neutered further with each upgrade cycle and your own only routing consists of sending stuff upstream on your sole connection to your sole ISP, is probably not a good idea. What can one do? Learn about wireless mesh networking fast I guess...
Choice of masters is not freedom.
He is using copyright as an excuse, he is not interested in distributing the video himself. He was just caught cheating in front of the camera and wants to clean all evidence.
Excellent, I have a new hero! James Randi!!
e lated&search=
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James Randi exposes Uri Geller and Peter Popoff (Faith Healer)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9w7jHYriFo&mode=r
James Randi exposes James Hydrick
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlfMsZwr8rc&mode=r
There are many, many more debunkings (sp?) by this fine man. Just search YouTube for 'James Randi'.
SD
IANAL by I know people are allowed to copy a small percentage for fair use. 8 seconds in 13 minutes sounds like it would fall within that margin.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I find it funny when the term fraud and magic are in the same sentence. I might be a little fuzzy on the exact legal definition of fraud. But people know magic is fake, and that it's an illusion done for entertainment. No magician is fraudulent unless he is specifically saying "yes I am REALLY doing this, not faking it" even then people would see it as part of the gimmick.
I thought fraud was designed for people who are trying to do something counter to what they said, when no concept of "for entertainment purposes" is implied.
Just ONE?
Pffft
(stands on aircraft carrier, proudly)
Never heard of this guy before. What I know now is:
... wait, I know! He is Bender!
- he bends metal
- he is annoying
- he is con-artist
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
"Uri Geller Accused of Bending Copyright Law"
See? He DOES have power...
this ass clown is getting tons of free publicity.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Does anyone else find it strange that a /. reader was also reading Fox News?
Uri? That's okay I guess, but I'm going to name my first born 'Hypertext'. I figure it's a gender neutral name.
While I'm not sure that copyright registration would solve the problem (I'm pretty sure the RIAA registers their copyrights! It's not even very expensive.) I really don't see why you care so much about a video of a cat flushing a toilet. What? Because it's your cat? I mean, it's not like you put any creativity into it, you just were told "Honey, look at that!" and grabbed a camera, no?
But frankly, I take the opposite stance. Granted, some of it is because when I write, it's usually to persuade, but I _like_ to see people take my ideas on as their own. It means that they not only agree with me, but that they don't think of my position as my position, but as their own. But on another level, that means that they really enjoyed whatever I made.
And as someone who knows better than to want to be famous, that's much, much better than making sure the internet damn well knows that it was my cat video that started that stupid internet chain letter.
He even tried his evil scheme against a pokemon,
n November of 2000 it was reported that Uri Geller, an Israeli psychic-magician who claims to bend spoons with his mind, sued Nintendo over the Pokémon "Yungerer" (renamed Kadabra in English localizations) which he claimed was an unauthorized appropriation of his identity. The Pokémon in question has psychic abilities and carries bent spoons.
Damn that spoonbending freak of nature.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
There is no copyright law.
There is only greed.
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
Defeat THE JEWS/ZIONISTS!
As we all know, NO ONE can do that. The law is definitely unmalleable in this regard.
Fake Rolex watches, OTOH, want to be free.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Exposing Uri Geller's spoon bending as fake is like exposing Pamela Anderson's breasts as fake. What's the point? It spoils the fun, and those who still think it's real aren't going to be convinced anyway.
... for using your influence in our media and academia to flood our minds with pornography and lies, as well as inculcating in us a hatred for our history... <b> is mine. Lacing your bile with made up words makes it smell even more worserer."i'm a douchebag" cards!
Actually I'll disagree about people being unable to think logically or analytically, seein' as basically it's a built in mechanism.
That's how even learn to speak or function in the first years of your life. A baby has to, pretty much, reverse engineer speech and their own larynx and facial muscles, and do a lot of trial and error experimentation, to even start to speak.
Ok, let's say maybe that's a subconscious process, but then so is a lot of what we call "intuition" or, basically, how "Eureka!" moments work. There's a lot of processing in there that's really analytical thought, even if it doesn't happen in words.
At any rate, even later, logical and analytical thought are a part of your every day life. I've yet to meet anyone who was literally unable of it. You'd know them, because they'd be the guys who can't figure out how to work a lot of the every day items around them without being explained how to, every time they forgot or meet a new one. (Though it must be also said that it seems to be a somewhat common female syndrome to _pretend_ to be unable to do even the most trivial tasks, so the male knight in shiny armour has to come to the rescue. Think of it as trolling for attention, though, not as being genuinely unable to figure out where the USB cable from the camera goes.) And if someone was unable to follow simple "cause => consequence" logic, which is what some of the more illogical beliefs boil to, then they'd also be unable to solve such problems as "how do I turn the light on?"
Yes, there are _some_ such people, but they're a tiny minority. They're called retards. We're not even talking "less than average intelligence", we're talking the ones who get to be adults and (due to some brain disease or defect) still stuck at the mental level of a 2 year old or even worse.
Everyone else _is_ doing logical and analytical thought every day, even if they don't know fancy words for it. Believe it or not, you don't _need_ fancy lessons to do logic and solve problems in your head. Formal logic didn't teach people how to do it, it just reverse-engineered something that people were doing all the time anyway.
When people do appear illogical or unable of problem-solving is when, basically, they're not sincere (often even to themselves) about what problem they solve or about what axioms they use. They start from what they really want, solve that, then solve the extra problem of what acceptable excuse to use. When you see people string a bunch of fallacies to reach some utterly illogical conclusion, that's your clue that that's what's really at work: they're not telling you the _real_ problem they're trying to solve, or the _real_ criteria they're applying there.
People solve problems every day like "I want to have some power over you", "I want a status symbol", "I want to feel like I'm smarter than you all" (a nerd favourite), "I'm lazy and I want to work less" or "I want a bigger slice of the pie, fairness be damned." So they arrive at something that solves that problem, like, say "ok, so I'm buying a car with a wing, and you can freakin' keep taking the bus." But they can't tell you the real reason, or sometimes they can't even tell themselves the real reason. So now they have to work backwards to some reason why they objectively need an expensive car with a wing. If there is no real logic (that they can admit) that will reach the pre-defined "I need an expensive car with a wing" conclusion, then they'll have to string some fallacies to get there.
That's, in a nutshell, how people manage to look illogical, in spite of having a brain wired for logic.
Block-headed religiousness is just a particular case of that. People start from, basically, "death is scary and I need some way to think it won't _really_ happen" or "it's too depressing to think all this is my responsibility and fault, I need someone else who's responsible for my life" or even "dammit, I'm an insignificant loser, I wish I could feel like I'm someone really important, like saving the whole world
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The motion to dismiss Geller's bad suit cites "Gregerson v. Vilana", a defamation/copyright lawsuit I'm a party to (I'm the Plaintiff, Gregerson). www.eff.org/legal/cases/sapient_v_geller/sapient_m otiontodismiss.pdf.
It's cited as a minor point in the memorandum on page 22, about fair use being an affirmative defense versus a basis for dismissal.
My case is described on my page:
Gregerson v. Vilana
www.cgstock.com
You have to look beyond the obvious. This clip oozes social criticism with the toilet being a metaphor for society itself and the cat symbolizing the carnivorous elitists who, once they find out that they CAN do it, will flush society down the drain over and over and over while curiously observing whether or not it will flush the same way as last time or whether there are slightly noticeable differences. The cat characterizes the authoritarian attitude of "I will keep doing this as long as I like to, and there's not a darn thing you can do about it!" while the toilet has to endure all this until the water runs out, or the pet owner steps in. The water of course being the peoples' spirit and the pet owner (i.e. the omniscient observer) stepping in representing divine intervention.
Cat flushing toilet: PURE GENIUS!
When you chase a dream, especially one with plastic chests, you sometimes do not see what is right in front of you.
Well, then you're still including folks like Uri Geller in the unethical category then.
1. Uri Geller himself claims that he has been employed by some companies to dowse for minerals or oil, though none actually admitted it. I'm sorry, but if that's true, that's _exactly_ fraud. He's taken some money for a service he can't provide, and based on some qualifications which are bogus.
2. There is a lot of damage done even indirectly in claiming to actually have psychic powers or being able to see into the future, for example by convincing people to lose their money on predictions and courses of action which don't work.
E.g., Uri Geller himself often tells people on what sports teams to bet, but it turns out most of the time his picks lose. E.g., dowsing, in addition to the money actually taken for providing that bogus service, usually results in a company wasting a lot of money to actually drill there. The whole buying the rights, hauling the equipment there, salaries, etc, adds up to a fair sum.
And while in this case it just boils down to money and faceless corporations, so I can imagine some people wouldn't feel much empathy there, but other quacks cause a lot more damage to normal people like you and me. E.g., psychic healers and the like routinely tell people to stop taking medicine, and are responsible for quite a few deaths. There have been even cases where some psychic or "holistic" healer quack told even people with _cancer_ to not have an operation, not take medicine, and ffs not even take the pain killers. So the they effectively have on their conscience (that is, if they had a conscience) causing someone to die in horrible pain over several months. How's that for damage done?
Way I see it, even if it's not done for money, convincing people to do harm to themselves is still morally wrong. And society as a whole already decided that the worst cases of it should be illegal. E.g., entrapment is not just morally wrong, but legally wrong too. E.g., claiming to be a medical doctor without a diploma is illegal in most places. Etc.
I don't have a problem there with those who admit they're just doing entertainment tricks, because then the audience knows it's just entertainment and won't base their RL decisions on it. E.g., not many people go and stake someone because they just saw a vampire movie. But claiming such powers to be real and giving people advice from a position of knowledgeable authority is an entirely different thing.
3. A lot of the charlatans claiming powers and secret knowledge are busy overtly attacking science and the scientific method, to make it easier for themselves to get their credentials accepted. This causes society as a whole a lot more harm than you'd think. If nothing else, by making more people susceptible to be harmed by the con artists from points 1 and 2.
But then that's the happy case, if only that was the damage done. It often causes people in positions of power and responsibility to put their funding and support in the quack camp, instead of doing some real science. When I hear stuff like corporations using numerology to thin the candidates pool, or using dowsing to find out where to drill next, that's not just directly X money which could be used on a more scientific approach and maybe discover something. That's also indication of a state of mind of trusting quacks over scientists, and I just don't see that company investing in scientific research the rest of the time.
To get back to Uri Geller, again, that's what he actively does all the time. To establish his credentials as the uber-psychic, he _has_ to attack the normal science, and that he does plenty.
So basically, to wrap this long rant up, there is no such thing as merely "hard" and "soft" psychics. "Hard" in that case invariably means a con artist who, directly or indirectly, does actual harm and is morally reprehensible in doing so. The question isn't just whether they bluff about their actual talents, but what actual harm they do based on that claim, or to support that claim.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Your own source says his schtick is not limited to telekinesis:
"Gag me with a spoon!"
Geller needs to get a life. Seriously.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
He harasses newspapers too.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Yes, I see no input devices tag here.
(IANAL)
> > There is no copyright law.
> There is only greed.
Uri, when an MPAA goon asks you if you've got fair use rights, you say yes!
This brings an interesting thought:
Say someone uses fair use for 10 different movies in footage legally, but does so, many times of different unique segements of that movie. Ending up with 200+ "fair use" "movies", that all use fair use legally. Now whats to stop someone from doing so, and then having a person reassemble those segments of fair use to re-create the full movie?
Whats to say that when downloading from bittorrent, the same cannot be applied? Can one not claim fair use from bittorrent movies, because technically theyre only downloading 10 seconds "fair use" from 2000 people, all fair use?
Can this not be a legal defense?
Ever heard of it? You are blaming people's character rather than their circumstances. That's usually wrong. Not only that, but it's usually just an excuse to brag about one's own character, which is another example of the same damn logical error.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Ok, nobody will see this as it's an old story (from several hours ago) and I'm posting AC, but
Sapient uses a pseudonym because he says he receives numerous death threats from those opposed to the anti-religious beliefs touted on his Web site.
What sort of "Christian" makes death threats? I mean, come on... "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." "Judge not, lest ye be judged yourself". Of course, it says "anti-religion" rather than "anti-Christian", but the Jews and Muslims share the same ten commandments as Christians, one of which is "thou shalt not kill."
If you're bombing abortion clinics or sending death threats to athiest webmasters, you'de not much of a Christian. If you're firing rockets at automobiles in Palestine you're not much of a Jew. If you're strapping on explosives to blow yourself up and take out a dozen people with you, you're not much of a Muslim. Bhuddists worship life and won't take it, either. And if you preside over more executions than any other Governor of the state that executes more people than any other, then become US President and start a war so your family can get more oil money, you're Goddamned sure not much of a Christian. Where do asshats who threaten death and indeed cause death come off as calling themselves "religious?"
there is no spoon, only a fork.
-mcgrew
I was temporarily hosting a video clip from a British hidden camera type show where you can clearly see Uri bending a spoon with his hands when he thought nobody was looking.
I got a cease and desist letter from his lawyer. It is one of my most cherished possessions.
I'd just like to know one thing. Does Mr. Geller weigh more than a duck?
I personally would much rather see a vertically challenged, palm-reading, murderer escape from jail.
The headline would be....wait for it...
"Small Medium at Large"
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?