WASHINGTON – Frank "Peter" Petrella helped world middleweight champion Jake LaMotta teach actor Robert De Niro how to box for the Academy Award-winning film Raging Bull. Now Petrella's daughter is taking those fight lessons into a different arena—the U.S. Supreme Court. In Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 12-1315, Paula Petrella asks the justices to give her the chance to prove that MGM infringed the copyright on her late father's screenplay which, she contends, formed the basis for Raging Bull, considered one of the best films ever made.
At the same time, a new organization of lawyers representing artists, writers and other creators is urging the high court to use her case to repudiate the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, noting that a judge on that intermediate appeal court has called it "the most hostile to copyright owners of all the circuits." The organization's founder said that no plaintiff has won a literary copyright infringement case against film studios or networks in the Ninth Circuit in two decades.
