Legal News

?Expelled? Plaintiffs Drop Suits. . . And Win?

By Dan Slater

The makers of the film “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” have won a reprieve from litigation brought by Yoko Ono and EMI Records. On its face, the outcome looks like a win for the filmmakers at Premise Media: After both state and federal courts rejected attempts by EMI and Yoko to enjoin the film, both plaintiffs dropped their suits against Premise Media. (Yoko dropped her federal suit last month; EMI dropped its state suit yesterday.)

Yet, as Premise’s lawyer, Stanford’s Tony Falzone, writes on his blog, “the right result came far too late. The mere pendency of these cases caused the film’s DVD distributor to shy away from releasing the full film — the version that includes the Imagine segment. So the film goes out on DVD on October 21 in censored form, illustrating the damage that even an unproved and unsupported infringement claim can do.”

Here’s the legal backstory on the ‘Expelled’ saga: The film, starring journalist and actor Ben Stein (Columbia, ‘66; Yale Law, ‘70), tries to make the point that American academia discriminates against people who espouse “intelligent design” theory — an alternative to evolution. In the course of ridiculing what they see as an academic world dominated by secular views, the filmmakers use a 15 second clip of John Lennon’s song “Imagine” (”Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion too”). The purpose of using the clip, according to Stanford’s Falzone, is to criticize the song’s “overtly anti-religious message” as “dangerously naive.” (Past LB coverage of the case here, here and here.)

Yoko was repped by Jonas Herbsman, of Shukat, Arrow, Hafer, Weber & Herbsman. EMI was repped by Richard Mandel at Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman.

LB Movie Suggestion: We haven’t seen “Expelled” yet, though we find its premise intriguing. For those of you who sympathize with the opposite view — that religion is dangerous — we can recommend Bill Maher’s “Religulous.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on October 07, 2008 (boomark / email).