YouTube to take down THAT anti-Muslim vid ... over COPYRIGHT issues

Google has been ordered to remove an inflammatory anti-Muslim film from YouTube.

Clips from the low-budget Innocence of Muslims flick will be purged after an actress who appeared in the film obtained a court order. Cindy Lee Garcia says she was duped into participating in the movie, The Verge reports.

After receiving death threats, Lee Garcia went to law and succeeded in obtaining a temporary takedown order against clips of the film over alleged copyright violations.

Garcia was paid $500 for a minor speaking part in what she was led to believe would be a sword-and-sandals movie called Desert Warrior but her scenes were edited into the new film and overdubbed with the exceptional provocative line "Is your Mohammed a child molester?"

Actors usually give up the right to assert copyright protection, however lawyers for Lee Garcia persuaded the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that this didn't apply in this case because the finished product bore little or no resemblance to the film Lee Garcia agreed to participate in making. The majority ruling is likely to be the subject of an appeal because it sets a precedent for actors that film studios may find unpalatable.

But for now at least the legal action has achieved what protests across the Muslim world in 2012, and denial of service attacks against US banks reportedly run by Islamic hacktivists from the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters crew*, failed to achieve.

Techdirt has an analysis of the appeal court ruling here. ®

Bot-note

Unnamed US spooks told friendly US media outlets that the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters were a front for elements of the Iranian government and/or military. No evidence was ever offered to support these claims and, as security experts pointed out, any common or garden hacker with access to a server-based botnet would have been able to throw the 75Gbps attacks witnessed against US banks.