Google Loses Emergency Bid To Keep “Innocence Of Muslims” Film Online

She may eventually prevail and have only her portion of the video removed, with the rest able to be distributed intact. Until that day, though, that in no way justifies the government restraining speech before her claim is even evaluated, especially given the particulars of the case. Prior restraint is almost universally a very bad thing, and something that needs to be fought tooth and claw.

I don't understand that argument. I thought copyright (outside of dance) was created when that creativity was affixed to media. Doesn't the person filming it own that copyright?

That is quite rude on the producers part however the reality is producers are bound to fuck you over if you act for long enough.

Really not cool on his part but that's a different issue.

The person didn't exert her rights because she didn't agree with the movie she did it because she got death threats.

Motivation is important.

Really ? We're talking about actors here. Isn't this akin to claiming Christian Bale's political views have been "misrepresented" as vigilantism ? Seriously. These are actors. Nobody in their right mind assumes they espouse the views they do on screen.

I find it weird that people are conflating different religions/ideologies here and attempting to apply one to the other, and guess what ?

1) people are angry about the result

2) it doesn't work, doesn't produce consistent thinking

Let's get real here :

a) it is an essential part of islam, to hunt down and execute people who criticize islam. This should not be looked at as exceptional at all, in fact it is quite normal for religions and ideologies to do this. It is the normal case for ideologies to hunt down and punish/kill criticism. Yes, Christianity doesn't do so, and obviously America's own brand of democracy doesn't either (of course, in both cases you can still give examples where people were executed for their opinions. The point is, it is not done as a matter of course, the way it is done in islamic nations, or china)

b) The idea of separating the person from their political (and business) activities the way it is done in the modern western world, like you're doing, sounds absurd to anyone outside of said western world. In most societies, whether muslim, chinese, black african ideologies, the roman empire, ... and even what we know about others like aztec civilization there is absolutely zero difference between the person, the job, and the political activities. So yes, in all those civilizations actors routinely get punished if they follow wrong ideologies.

c) the idea that no ideology is "wrong" (or rather, that there is more than one acceptable ideology at all) is very new, and fake. Obviously what people really mean is that as long as you consider our Christianity-derived law as the primary ideology, you can call yourself whatever the fuck you want. What is considered "disgusting", "extremist", "evil" and extremely illegal however, is applying even tiny amounts of sharia, or for another example communism in cases where it would violate our normal law. This is of course the whole point of those ideologies. What people mean when they say communism is NOT voluntary sharing of capital. What people mean when they say islam is NOT partially applying muslim food laws.

Whether this applies to copyright cases is still unclear, but it seems the Supreme Court has taken that stance: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1802778

Unlike some theocratic regimes where the maker of this film would be beheaded, at least we have some remaining freedom of speech and expression.

The right of free speech is not resolved in motherhood-and-apple-pie cases but in the extreme fringes of bad taste and offensiveness (Human Centipede, Nazi propaganda, etc)

It's not just a question of theocratic regimes. Every government everywhere tends to react to insults. If you don't believe me, next time you fly insult the TSA officers as much as you can and see how they react.

The way this is usually managed is by requiring a general tone of respect in a critique. It's the way it works in every Islamic country I have been in, as well as many others.

But there are two problems with this in the context of the US: First we have a history of the government silencing whatever ideas they can (trying to argue that distributing writings of Karl Marx amounts to the same thing as raising an army to violently overthrow the government).

The other problem in a pluralistic nation is that this sort of thing has to be a two way street to work. It's fine to insist that everyone speak at least somewhat respectful of another group but that only really works if there is reciprocal respect. More often it is a power play and that's the problem.