Blue Collar Scientist

The producers of Expelled, having been notified by XVIVO (pdf) that their movie infringed on XVIVO’s copyright of an animation of the inner workings of a cell, responded to that by almost immediately filing a lawsuit against XVIVO. This, of course, is well known, since it happened more than a week ago.

Yoko Ono, Sean Ono Lennon, Julian Lennon, and EMI Blackwood Music Inc, have apparently decided not to allow Expelled’s litigious, lawsuit-happy producers strike the first blow in their case. They have filed a lawsuit against Premise Media Corporation, C&S Production LP and Rocky Mountain Pictures, Expelled’s producers and distributors, seeking an injunction preventing them from continuing to use John Lennon’s song Imagine, and also seeking damages.

This story hits a little closer to home than most lawsuits involving big-ticket celebrities and movie distributors. BCS contributor Iatra Polygenos, back when she was a freshly-minted veterinarian, was part of a team that treated one of Yoko Ono’s cats. Iatra is loyal to her clients, even clients that really belonged to her clinicians at a time before she really had clients of her own, so the BCS family is rooting for the plaintiffs in this case, just out of sheer biased loyalty.

As many people have pointed out, plagiarists don’t steal from just one source. If you do it once, you are going to do it again, and again, and again. Plagiarists are serial offenders by nature.

I’m not sure what is going to happen next, but it seems likely that the next shoe to drop will involve Expelled’s alleged stealing of video from PBS. Or it might have something to do with Expelled’s use of the song All these Things That I Have Done, by The Killers, which has also been said to be a result of plagiarism.

What’s sad about these cases is that it is really simple to get rights to clips and music. For the most part, all you have to do is call up whoever owns the rights, and ask for a license to use the material. A fee is negotiated, usually off a fairly standard fee system, you pay it, and you get to use the material¹. The only reason someone wouldn’t do this if they were going to use three major pieces of other peoples’ work in a movie that opens in 1,052 theaters would be - well, that they are bad, evil little people.

1. Granted, the licensing fee for a song of the significance of Imagine would be very high. [↩]