Legal Geek No. 7: Actor Copyrights and How Appeals Courts Work

Welcome back to Legal Geek! The topic this week updates a recent story on actor's copyrights to help answer a listener question on how appeals work.


https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp07

A listener Robert has asked for a brief overview of how appeals work, likely relative to the ongoing court battle over the Innocence of Muslims movie trailer discussed on a previous segment.

As a reminder, Judge Kozinski and a three-judge panel at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that actors have some sort of limited copyright in their performance in a film. This extension of traditional copyright allowed the court to order Youtube and Google to take down the controversial movie trailer.

Since the ruling, the U.S. Copyright Office has denied registration to the very copyright that the Ninth Circuit panel based this opinion upon. As a result, Google immediately petitioned for a rehearing of the takedown order in front of a larger panel of Ninth Circuit judges called an en banc hearing. That request has been denied, but Google still has options.

Federal lawsuits generally begin in District Courts, which are 94 local/regional courts across the country with at least one in each state. Appeals from District Court decisions go to one of the 12 regional Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Ninth Circuit covers many of the westernmost states, for example. Three judge panels are typically used, but these decisions can be overturned by the en banc rehearings mentioned previously or by the Supreme Court. 

Thus, to keep it simple, Google and Youtube will continue to fight this legal battle in the Ninth Circuit until all options are exhausted, and then if still unsuccessful, a petition for a Supreme Court hearing will happen. The Supreme Court typically only gets involved in important questions about Constitutional law, and the proper scope of copyright would be a good issue in view of the different opinions of the executive branch at the Copyright Office and the judicial branch at the Ninth Circuit.


Bottom line: The news is bad for Google this week, and Innocence of Muslims will get taken down based on a questionably-reasoned decision. But this critical copyright fight is not over until the Supreme Court says it is over.

Thanks again to Robert for the question.

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