Category: Lawsuits

Lord of the Rings director sues over claims his company shortchanged
LOS ANGELES (AP) – Peter Jackson’s production company has sued New Line Cinema, claiming it was shortchanged on profits from the first film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Wingnut Films alleges in a federal lawsuit filed in Los Angeles that New Line and subsidiary Katja Motion Pictures failed to properly calculate revenue, including revenue from DVD sales, from 2001’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
The lawsuit doesn’t specify an amount sought in damages but claims the movie grossed more than $314 million US in box office receipts in the United States and more than $556 million overseas, plus revenue from video and merchandise sales.
The lawsuit accuses the studio of giving affiliates favourable licensing deals. It seeks a court injunction against New Line from reaching deals related to the film with affiliates “without first seeking the most competitive and beneficial deals from unaffiliated third parties in a free and open market.”

Record Industry Sues 753 for Song Swaps
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A recording industry trade group on Monday said it has filed another wave of copyright infringement lawsuits against 753 people it suspects of distributing songs over the Internet without permission.
To date, the Recording Industry Association of America has sued over 9,000 people for distributing songs over “peer to peer” networks like eDonkey and Kazaa, in an effort to discourage the online song copying that it believe has cut into CD sales.
The trade group represents big record labels like Warner Music, EMI Group Plc, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Vivendi Universal’s Universal Music Group.

Record companies sue 754 more computer users for swapping music
LOS ANGELES (AP) – Recording companies filed copyright infringement lawsuits against 754 computer users Thursday, the latest round of legal action in the industry’s effort to squelch unauthorized swapping of music online.
Among the named defendants were 20 computer users suspected of swapping songs over university networks, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group for the largest music companies. Among the college and universities attended by students named in the lawsuits were University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University in New York, Old Dominion University and State University of West Georgia.
The colleges and universities were not named as defendants.
As in previous cases, the new lawsuits were filed against “John Doe” defendants – identified only by their numeric Internet protocol addresses. Music company lawyers must obtain the identity of defendants by issuing subpoenas to Internet access providers.
In all, recording companies have sued 7,704 computer users since September 2003. To date, 1,475 defendants have settled their cases out of court, the RIAA said.
Settlements in previous cases have averaged $3,000 US each.

Hollywood targets downloading
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Hollywood movie studios on Tuesday sued scores of operators of U.S.- and European-based computer servers that help relay digitized movie files across online file-sharing networks.
The copyright infringement suits expand on a new U.S. film industry initiative whose initial targets were individual file-swappers.
The defendants this time run servers that use BitTorrent, which has become the program of choice for online sharers of large files because of its immunity to industry attempts to confound file-swappers with bogus decoy files.
“Today’s actions are aimed at individuals who deliberately set up and operate computer servers and websites that, by design, allow people to infringe copyrighted motion pictures,” said John Malcolm, head of the Motion Picture Association of America’s antipiracy unit.
Malcolm, speaking at a Washington news conference, declined to name defendants. He said the suits, filed in the United States and Britain, targeted more than 100 server operators.
“These actors are neither innovative nor innocent,” Malcolm added. “These people are parasites, leeching off the creativity of others. Their illegal conduct is brazen and blatant.”
The initial wave of lawsuits targets computer servers that index movies for BitTorrent users, but Malcolm said the trade group is eyeing similar action against servers that direct data for the DirectConnect and eDonkey file-swapping services.
Malcolm noted that neither the creator nor distributors of BitTorrent, whose architecture enables speedy downloads because users share received bits of a file as it is downloaded, were targeted in the suits.
“The target of our actions is not technology,” Malcolm said. “There are many legal Torrent sites … that are dedicated to the distribution of public domain work and we are taking no action against them whatsoever.”
The three file-sharing aides work differently but enable computer users to share music, film, software and other files.
EDonkey and BitTorrent steadily gained in popularity after the recording industry began cracking down last year on users of Kazaa, Morpheus, Grokster and other established file-sharing software.
The MPAA is focusing its litigation on servers that link individuals who seek movie files to those who make them available.
The lawsuits follow the same logic employed when the recording industry successfully sued the original Napster file-sharing network. The creators of that software used a central computer server to keep and update an index of what music files were being made available by computer users on the network.
“By bringing these suits, the MPAA runs the risk of pushing the tens of millions of file sharers to more decentralized technologies that will be harder to police,” said Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.
Mike Godwin, legal director for Washington-based Public Knowledge, a group that tracks copyright and technology policy, said the same legal arguments against Napster may not stick in this case.
“There may be a legal problem in that some Torrent sites don’t really police what people use them for,” Godwin said. “In those cases, I think it’s hard to create traditional copyright infringement liability.”
Another potential wrinkle is that many of the computer servers are offshore, outside the scope of U.S. copyright law.
“It adds a level of complexity that makes it more difficult for someone from the United States to go after a tracker site,” Godwin said. “Tracker sites are often run by hobbyists. They go up, they go down. It’s a moving target and not a particularly large one.”
Hollywood movie studios contend that the unauthorized trading of films online has the potential to threaten their industry, particularly as increasing bandwidth makes the large movie files easier to download.
By comparison, music files are far smaller and swapped at greater volume.
Last month, the studios began suing computer users for swapping digitized films online for copyright infringement. The industry has also been a party to lawsuits against Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster.
The industry has failed to persuade U.S. federal courts to shut down the services, and is awaiting a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.

THE F BOMB STRIKES AGAIN
A Maryland man is suing Wal-Mart for selling his daughter an Evanescence CD that contains an obscenity. Wal-Mart has a policy of not carrying explicit music in its stores.

Investigators Search Jackson’s Ranch
LOS OLIVOS, Calif. – Sheriff’s investigators conducted a search of Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch on Friday, a department spokesman said.
Sgt. Chris Pappas confirmed that a warrant was served at the rural estate but he would not release any more information.
Jackson has already been charged with child molestation, and his Neverland ranch was searched previously in the case. He faces trial next year.
The search warrant was served at 9 a.m. and investigators remained there into the late morning, Pappas said.
Attorneys on both sides are barred from commenting on the case. A message seeking comment was left at the office of Jackson’s spokeswoman Raymone K. Bain.
Neverland, about 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles, was first searched on Nov. 18, 2003.
At least 60 investigators from the Sheriff’s Department and district attorney’s office conducted that raid on the multimillion-dollar property.
The theme park-like estate has a mansion, zoo and amusement park with bumper cars, a merry-go-round and Ferris wheel. Jackson hosted many children’s parties there.
Jackson was originally charged in December 2003 on allegations of molesting a boy. Prosecutors then took the case to the grand jury, which issued a superseding indictment in April.
The pop star has pleaded not guilty to child molestation, conspiracy and administering an intoxicating agent, alcohol, to the alleged victim. Jackson’s trial is scheduled to start Jan. 31.

Kazaa owners launch defence in file-swap copyright infringement case
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) – The owners of file-swapping giant Kazaa claimed Tuesday their software, which allows users to exchange copyrighted music and movies online, is no different from video recorders as they launched their defence in a landmark music piracy case in Australia.
Lawyer Tony Meagher was outlining his defence strategy on the second day of a civil case in which the Australian recording industry is suing Kazaa’s owners for widespread copyright infringements by the global network’s estimated 100 million members.
Kazaa members download three billion files each month, record industry lawyers said Monday. Those files can include songs, movies and other copyrighted material.
Meagher cited a 1984 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said electronics giant Sony wasn’t liable when people used its Betamax videocassette recorder to copy movies illegally because the technology had significant uses that did not violate copyrights.
The same case was cited in August when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that two other leading file-swapping networks, Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks Inc. were not legally liable for the songs, movies and other copyright works their users swapped online.
“It is plain (Kazaa) has lawful uses,” Meagher told Federal Court judge Murray Wilcox.
In another key element of the defendants’ defence in the three-week trial, Meagher said that even though the peer-to-peer software that underpins Kazaa allows users to breach copyright, the owners of Kazaa do not authorize piracy and cannot stop it.
“We are not in a position to control and we do not control use,” Meagher said.
A licence agreement that all Kazaa users have to agree to before downloading the Kazaa software tells them they must not use the network to distribute copyrighted material, but the record industry says Kazaa makes no effort to enforce the agreement.

Mindy McCready pleads guilty to drug charge
FRANKLIN, Tenn. (AP) — Mindy McCready, who had a No. 1 hit in 1996 with “Guys Do It All the Time,” pleaded guilty Monday to purchasing painkillers with a false prescription.
The country singer was fined $4,000, sentenced to three years of supervised probation and ordered to perform 200 hours of community service.
McCready, who turns 28 today (Tuesday), was accused of fraudulently obtaining OxyContin at a Brentwood pharmacy in February, using a friend’s name on the prescription.
Her other hits include “Ten Thousand Angels” and “A Girl’s Gotta Do (What a Girl’s Gotta Do).”

Hey, Teacher! We All Need Some Compensation
LONDON (Reuters) – A group of former London schoolchildren who sang on Pink Floyd’s 1979 classic “Another Brick In The Wall” have lodged a claim for unpaid royalties.
Twenty three teenage pupils from Islington Green School secretly recorded vocals for the track, which became an anthem for children with the chorus “We don’t need no education.”
On hearing the song, the headmistress banned the pupils from appearing on television or video — leaving them no evidence and making it harder for them to claim royalties — and the local school authority described the lyrics as “scandalous.”
The album sold over 12 million copies and the single became number one in Britain and America.
Royalties expert Peter Rowan told Reuters he was appealing to a music royalties society on behalf of one former pupil and was working with other members of the class. He said he was still trying to contact the majority of the group.
“They are owed their money and we lodged the first claim last week,” Rowan told Reuters. “I’ve been working on it for almost two years.”
Music teacher Alun Renshaw took the schoolchildren to a nearby recording studio without the permission of the headmistress after being approached by the band’s management.
The lyrics “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control, no dark sarcasm in the classroom — teachers leave them kids alone” were described by the Inner London Education Authority as scandalous.
The school was paid 1,000 pounds ($1,860) and later given a platinum record of the song but the pupils were paid nothing.
Rowan said the money would come from a music royalties society and not Pink Floyd. He expected the 23 pupils to receive about 200 pounds each.
The application for royalties was initially hindered by the lack of evidence but Renshaw said Margaret Maden, then the school headmistress and now a university professor, had supported their application.
“We had to provide evidence to show they were part of the song and Mrs Maden helped us with that,” he said.
Renshaw told the Evening Standard newspaper the band’s offer had been “an interesting sociological thing and also a wonderful opportunity for the kids to work in a live recording studio.
“I sort of mentioned it to the headteacher, but didn’t give her a piece of paper with the lyrics on it.”

Willis Cries Foul over “Tears”
Bruce Willis, accused of being a “pain in the ass” on the set of Tears of the Sun, says its filmmakers were a pain, too. A pain in the head.
Willis has sued the studio behind the 2003 action-war movie over a combat sequence that the star alleges hurt his forehead and caused “extreme mental, physical and emotional pain and suffering.”
The lawsuit, filed Oct. 20 in Los Angeles, was made public Monday by The Smoking Gun. Revolution Studios and Joe Pancake, a crew member identified on IMDb.com as the special-effects foreman of Tears of the Sun, are named as defendants.
Revolution said Monday it could not address the lawsuit. Pancake could not be located for comment.
At issue are the movie-making events of Oct. 21, 2002. In the complaint, Willis says he took “a projectile” to the forehead as he shot a scene simulating a spray of bullets. Willis blames the injury on a negligently placed and detonated squib, a special-effects explosive that substitutes for real, live gunfire.
Willis accuses Revolution and Pancake of negligence and of exposing him and others to “ultrahazardous activity.” His lawsuit seeks unspecified damages.
Movie star injuries on set are not uncommon; lawsuits are. Halle Berry (broken arm on Gothika, debris to the eye on Die Another Day) and Nicole Kidman (cracked rib, bum knee on Moulin Rouge) are two banged-up actors who didn’t limp off to court. (At least not yet.) Hollywood’s most infamous on-the-set accident–the 1982 helicopter mishap on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie that killed Vic Morrow and two child actors–resulted in the most serious kind of legalese–a manslaughter trial.
Specifics on Willis’ injury were not known, outside of the lawsuit noting that the Die Hard icon is still incurring medical expenses. A call to Willis’ publicist was not returned Monday.
Tears of the Sun, shot mainly in Hawaii, was released in March 2003. It grossed an underwhelming $43.7 million domestically, and another $42.3 million overseas–the cumulative take still short of the $110 million spent on its producing and marketing, per BoxOfficeMojo.com.
In the film, Willis, “a universally known motion picture star and celebrity,” per his lawsuit, played a Navy SEAL officer sent to war-torn Africa to rescue a doctor (Monica Bellucci).
Willis and director Antoine Fuqua clashed during production, with Fuqua telling BBC.com that Willis was the biggest “pain in the ass” he’d ever worked with.
“We just didn’t get along,” Fuqua said. “We got along off camera, but shooting, we just didn’t get along.”
Alleged forehead issues aside, the 49-year-old Willis has recovered from the box-office bruising he endured with Tears of the Sun. By IMBb.com’s count, he has five films in production or post-production, including Alpha Dog, a true-crime drama costarring Justin Timberlake.