Movies

This is pretty good…

The copyright infringment continues–it seems that “Expelled” makes use of about 25 seconds of John Lennon’s song “Imagine,” but permission was neither sought nor granted for its use: In a written statement, the film’s three producers – Walt Ruloff, John Sullivan and Logan Craft – acknowledged that they did not seek permission, but they called the use “momentary.” “After seeking the opinion of legal counsel it was seen as a First Amendment issue and protected under the fair use doctrine of free speech,” the statement said. A spokeswoman said under 25 seconds of the song are used in the movie.Now this is actually an instance where I agree with “Expelled”’s producers–this should fall within fair use guidelines. The courts, however, have already ruled otherwise. (UPDATE: Not quite accurate, see correction below.) In 2005, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films that even a 1.5-second sample requires a license. I’d be happy to see a lawsuit on this issue result in that ruling being overturned. I’ve previously written about the danger of such erosion of fair use to the creation of new music in one of this blog’s more popular posts. The link at the end of that post about “Amen Brother” is well worth your time. (Also related is this film in which fair-use samples from Disney films are used to make Disney characters explain current U.S. copyright law.) UPDATE (April 18, 2008): Russell Blackford argues that “Expelled”’s use of “Imagine” is to make comment on the content of the song, and makes a moral case for the legitimacy of its use. I agree with his argument–the use of a sample of the song to make comment on it enhances the case for “fair use,” but I think it should have met fair use guidelines even without that. UPDATE (April 23, 2008): As commenter lquilter points out below, the Bridgeport case did not say quite what I said above–it doesn’t eliminate fair use as a defense to a use of small samples, it eliminates the argument that sampling is using so little of the original material that no copyright applies. The result is that a lengthier court proceeding is required to fight for such use. “Expelled”’s makers are now being sued over the use of “Imagine." I don’t feel bad for them, but I think they should win their case. This probably guarantees that the film will not make a profit from its theatrical run, after deducting legal expenses. UPDATE (May 1, 2008): The Stanford Law School’s Fair Use Project has signed on to defend “Expelled” against the Ono Lennon lawsuit. Good for them, I hope they win this one. It shouldn’t be difficult. UPDATE (May 2, 2008): P.Z. Myers points out distortions in “Expelled”’s press release about the their defense in the “Imagine” lawsuit. Even in the rare case when I agree with them (their fair use defense here), they still have to throw in a distortion or two to show that they are sleazy, I guess. (I disagree with Myers’ assertion that there is no commentary on the song; see Russell Blackford’s analysis, linked to above.) Perhaps the strongest argument against “Expelled” in this case is that they sought licenses for other songs they used, but did not even attempt to get permission for “Imagine,” as pointed out by Laura Quilter (who has also commented here). UPDATE (May 5, 2008): The judge in the case has enjoined “Expelled” from any further distribution or DVD release, though they can continue showing the film in the theaters where it’s already playing (currently down to 655 theaters). UPDATE (May 9, 2008): And now down to 402 theaters. UPDATE (June 2, 2008): The judge has ruled against Yoko Ono’s motion for a permanent injunction against “Expelled” on the grounds that the defendants are likely to prevail. ...

The folks at XVIVO have argued that “Expelled” has engaged in copyright infringement by directly copying from their film, “The Inner Life of the Cell.” The “Expelled” producers have responded by claiming that they constructed their film based on original research: However, the latest claim concerning the copyright status of our proprietary animation is so ridiculous, bogus and misinformed that we must respond. Premise Media invested significant time and money into the research and original creation of the animation used in our film to illustrate cellular activity. Our own team of experts created the highest quality of animation that is available. In fact, the animation we use in the theatrical release of our movie is only a small portion of the animation we have created and plan to use in future projects.Darwin Central has proposed a paternity test in the form of a series of image comparisons. On the left hand side, images from a variety of sources showing a particular process in the cell that is depicted by “The Inner Life of the Cell.” On the right hand side, a comparison image from the “Expelled” segment at issue. Surely, if the “Expelled” producers are correct, there should be no reason to find any special similarity between the image on the left that comes from XVIVO’s film and the image that comes from “Expelled” versus any of the other images on the left. See for yourself. It also appears that other parts of “Expelled”’s animations have been taken from other sources, to which John Wilkins has a connection! Yet Premise Media is suing XVIVO, seeking a declaratory judgment in Texas! This sounds like venue shopping or “forum shopping," since XVIVO is in Massachusetts. UPDATE: ERV has a copy of the complaint and a summary. She also includes a new video, that she speculates has replaced the XVIVO-copied video in the final film. UPDATE (April 19, 2008): The footage copied from XVIVO was apparently removed from the film before yesterday’s public release. ...

The NCSE’s “Expelled Exposed” website has now gone live, and it contains a wealth of factual background information about the alleged cases of suppression of intelligence design presented in the film “Exposed,” as well as highlighting other information left out of the film and the story of the deceptive methods used by the producers of the film. The home page of the site features the story of Chris Comer, Director of Science for the Texas Education Agency. Unlike any of the alleged victims of persecution in “Expelled,” she was actually forced to resign from her position. Not because she was an advocate of intelligent design, but because she sent out an email announcing a university lecture by Barbara Forrest, a philosopher critical of intelligent design. The next main area of the site is titled “The Truth Behind the Fiction," which has the following sections: THE SCIENTIFIC CLAIMS EvolutionIntelligent DesignChallenging ScienceScience & ReligionHitler & EugenicsTHE “EXPELLED”Richard SternbergGuillermo GonzalezCaroline CrockerRobert MarksPamela WinnickMichael Egnor The next area of the site, “Behind the Scenes," explains the deception, dishonesty, and hypocrisy of the makers of the film: What is Premise Media?Questionable Interview TacticsMarketing with a MotiveSilencing the Dissenters Finally, the last section of the site is a collection of resources which has been on the site for some time, but is constantly growing–a list of news coverage and reviews of the film. Check out the site for the facts that the makers of “Expelled” don’t want you to see.

John Lynch has discovered an unintentional irony in “Expelled." While the movie tries to argue that Darwinism led to Hitler, one of the anti-Darwinists interviewed in the film, Maciej Giertych, also happens to be an old-fashioned anti-Semite who thinks that Jews intentionally create ghettos to live in, are unethical swindlers who do not have any moral respect for the law, and who move to rich countries in order to exploit them. One commenter points out that Giertych has also praised Spain’s fascist leader Francisco Franco (who is still dead). Another observes that Giertych is, in at least a small way, a Holocaust denier, denying that gentile Poles carried out the Jedwabne pogrom of 1941. Giertych has also been published by Answers in Genesis’ Creation magazine, in 1995, and is a signatory to the Discovery Institute’s “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism” statement. Clearly, racism does not require a belief in evolution. ...

Wesley Elsberry points out that Ben Stein has reported in an interview that he was approached for the “Expelled” project, described more or less as it finally came to be, back in 2006. Part of the pitch was that he was shown XVIVO’s “Inner Life of the Cell” video. Yet in April 2007 (a month after the “expelledthemovie.com” domain was registered), Mark Mathis obtained the cooperation of Genie Scott, P.Z. Myers, and other participants by pitching the nonexistent film “Crossroads,” about the intersection of science and religion, from “Rampant Films,” which had an innocuous website and an address at an empty apartment complex in Los Angeles. Stein’s interview provides further evidence that “Crossroads” was a dishonest subterfuge and that the “Expelled” crowd fully intended to use XVIVO’s film in their movie and did not commission their copy until after William Dembski was sent a cease and desist notice in September 2007, delaying the film’s release from February to April. See Wesley’s Austringer blog for more details.

ERV reports that Mike Edmondson, who was listed as the animator for “Expelled,” has left his employment with Premise Media and asked to have his name removed from their website. (UPDATE: It looks like Edmondson probably was responsible for the “Beware the Believers” YouTube video, but not the ripoff of the XVIVO film. Good for him for cutting ties with these liars and thieves.) (UPDATE April 21, 2008: It’s been confirmed that Edmondson made “Beware the Believers.") She also points out that it is William Dembski who observed that “Expelled”’s producers set aside budget for copyright infringement lawsuits. And that Jonathan Wells is helping with the foot bullets by claiming that “Expelled” produced their version of the XVIVO film in 3 months with one guy (where it took XVIVO a team of people 14 months). Looks like ERV is the blog to watch on this issue. She’s also the one who documented that William Dembski knew well that he was violating XVIVO’s copyright.

“Expelled” producer Mark Mathis says that Christians who believe in evolution were intentionally excluded from the film because they “would have confused the film unnecessarily.” (Don’t confuse people with the truth!) He goes on to say that “the form of Catholicism that Ken Miller [biology professor at Brown University and co-author of a popular biology textbook] accepts and practices is, is nowhere near the form of Catholicism that is followed by Catholics who are members of the Catholic church, who believe in Catholic doctrine." Mathis, who is not a Catholic, is apparently unaware that Miller’s view of evolution is consistent with the official position of the Catholic Church as set forth by both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. The Catholic Church’s position on evolution has been that it’s not in conflict with Christianity, since Pope Pius XII. Mathis should also take a look at the NCSE’s Voices for Evolution, where he’ll find that a lot of other Christian sects similarly have no problem with evolution. “Expelled” and its producers seem to want to force a false dilemma of a choice between Christianity or evolution, just as the young-earth creationists do. They don’t seem to realize that this kind of forced choice is one which will make any honest, inquiring mind who accepts the false dilemma to choose against Christianity. J.P. Hunt, a student in Ray Baird’s 1980 “balanced treatment” class on creationism and evolution at Emma C. Smith Elementary School in Livermore, California, said on the 1982 PBS show “Creation vs. Evolution: Battle in the Classroom”: Someone that I know has become an atheist because of this class, because the creationist theory was so stupid, he thought. Well, if religion requires me to believe this, then I don’t want to have any part of it.I don’t find this too objectionable as a consequence, personally. Learning that I was lied to by young-earth creationists was a significant factor in my abandonment of creationism, then Christianity, and then theism. The rampant dishonesty of the “Expelled” crowd will no doubt serve the same effect for others like me, and cause them to look to see if they’ve been similarly lied to about other things. Odds are, they will find that they have. (Via Stranger Fruit.)

Another negative review for the film, by Jeffrey Kluger. He specifically calls out the film for dishonesty: The man made famous by Ferris Bueller, however, quickly wades into waters far too deep for him. He makes all the usual mistakes nonscientists make whenever they try to take down evolution, asking, for example, how something as complex as a living cell could have possibly arisen whole from the earth’s primordial soup. The answer is it couldn’t–and it didn’t. Organic chemicals needed eons of stirring and slow cooking before they could produce compounds that could begin to lead to a living thing. More dishonestly, Stein employs the common dodge of enumerating all the admittedly unanswered questions in evolutionary theory and using this to refute the whole idea. But all scientific knowledge is built this way. A fishnet is made up of a lot more holes than strings, but you can’t therefore argue that the net doesn’t exist. Just ask the fish. ...

Scientific American: …it seems a safe bet that the producers hope a whipping from us would be useful for publicity: further proof that any mention of ID outrages the close-minded establishment. (Picture Ben Stein as Jack Nicholson, shouting, “You can’t handle the truth!”) Knowing this, we could simply ignore the movie–which might also suit their purposes, come to think of it. Unfortunately, Expelled is a movie not quite harmless enough to be ignored. Shrugging off most of the film’s attacks–all recycled from previous pro-ID works–would be easy, but its heavy-handed linkage of modern biology to the Holocaust demands a response for the sake of simple human decency. ...