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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.
he should have seen that one coming.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
The difference is that true magicians admit they're illusionists. Part of the contract with their audience is that they will fool them and that the audience will try to figure out their tricks. Geller does not claim to be a magician. He claims to actually do what he appears to be doing with the power of his mind.
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."
Geller does not claim to be a magician, he claims to actually posses mental powers. While many of us know this is silly, many people believe it, and are victimized because of it.
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)
Dude, get off your high horse. Everyone comes in to this world knowing exactly jack and shit. All a brain is is some tissue on the end of a stick, once I realized that I found that I have nothing but sympathy for every creature who has to figure out this world with only that as their tool.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
Excellent, I have a new hero! James Randi!!
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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
That's all fine and well, but IIRC Randi wasn't suing him for fraud, but trying prevent people from becoming mindless followers of Randi and buying into his hokey pseudo-religion. Secondly, it is debatable whether or not "people know magic is fake". Crossing Over, Faith Healers, Scientology, or most aspects of religion that people seem to get most caught up in, altogether garner the support and beliefs of hundreds of thousands of people. Randi is more or less concerned with protecting these damned fools from themselves, or at least providing them with an rational alternative from which they can choose.
If you've ever followed the details regarding incidents involving Geller that have happened over the past few decades you'd realize how what he does can be a dangerous thing.
Use a food analogy! Cheese and cake. Both had milk as a common ancestor, at some point there was a divergence. Milk became cheese and milk became cake, but cheese did not go into the cake. Unless you're making, like.. cheesecake, but it's best not to bring that up.
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.