On May 15, 2015, an en banc panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held in Garcia v. Google1 that an actor’s performance in a motion picture is not separately copyrightable, but instead is merged into the copyright for a film. In her action against Google, its subsidiary YouTube, the writer-director Mark Basseley Youssef and others for copyright infringement and various state law claims, plaintiff Cindy Lee Garcia sought emergency injunctive relief for a takedown order requiring YouTube and Google to remove a film titled “The Innocence of Muslims” from their websites. Youssef had misrepresented to Garcia that she would be acting in an action-adventure thriller set in ancient Arabia entitled Desert Warrior. However, the film that Youssef actually produced and which was uploaded to YouTube and elsewhere was a diatribe against Islam filled with hate speech.
Although the film contained Garcia’s five-second performance, Youssef dubbed over her actual words to make it appear as if Garcia had blasphemed the Prophet Mohammed. This resulted in the issuance by an Egyptian cleric of a fatwa (assassination order) against her and all others associated with the film. Garcia took numerous steps to disassociate herself from the blasphemous statements attributed to her in the film, including serving five takedown notices on Google (all rejected) and filing lawsuits in state and federal courts.
