Court ordered YouTube to remove the video in a unique decision

Feb 27, 2014 08:42 GMT  ·  By

YouTube will have to remove a video that is considered to be anti-Muslim after a court ruled that the company must comply.

YouTube considers that removing this type of video due to outside pressure only amounts to unwarranted government censorship and has engaged in the legal fight to protect the right to freedom of speech.

Regardless, the controversial video, that has sparked violence in the Middle East, including riots and clerics asking for the death of an American actress that appears briefly in the clip, will now have to be removed. A three-judge panel from the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco gave a favorable decision for the actress who filed the lawsuit.

Over the past months, YouTube has resisted calls from a number of world leaders, including US President Barack Obama, to take down the video. However, the site said that only the filmmakers of the “Innocence of Muslims” had the copyright over the video and they were the only ones who could remove it from YouTube.

This is, of course, how YouTube works in general. Unless a video violates copyright or its policies regarding decency laws, YouTube will not touch it.

While the court admitted that this case wasn’t exactly typical, the judges said that Cindy Lee Garcia, the actress that appeared in the movie, retained a copyright claim on the video and YouTube must respect that. The reason she claimed in court was that she was led to believe that she was acting in a different production than the movie that eventually ended up online.

On the other hand, Google argues that she has no copyright claim on the film because Mark Basseley Youseff, the filmmaker, wrote the lines, managed the production and even dubbed over Garcia’s dialogue in postproduction.

In order to make sure that the ruling isn’t taken as a blanket order that gives copyright protection to actors everywhere, the court said that this a specific case.

“We need not and do not decide whether every actor has a copyright in his performance within a movie. It suffices for now to hold that, while the matter is fairly debatable, Garcia is likely to prevail,” the judge wrote.

The actress only appears for about five seconds in the movie that producers told her was called “Desert Warrior” and she knew nothing about any connection with religion or radical Islam. Considering that her lines were dubbed over to make her character ask whether Muhammad was a child molester, it’s fairly easy to believe her point of view.