'Psychic' Uri Geller sued after trying to remove critical YouTube clip
Update on 3:40 p.m. PT Wednesday: It turns out that Geller has filed his own lawsuit. Here's our follow-up story.
We've all heard about wacky attempts to misuse the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "takedown" sections recently. There's been the Digg.com flap over a certain hex number beginning with "09 F9," the spat over a parody of the Colbert Report, and even one about a fake ID.
The latest attempt involves Uri Geller, the purported spoon-bending "psychic" who is trying to suppress a video on YouTube that claims Geller is a fraud and demonstrates sleight-of-hand tricks he could have used. The video was posted by the Rational Response Squad, a group of skeptics who take a scientific approach toward evaluating supernatural claims, and rely in part on YouTube to get the word out.
The offending video
Geller's U.K. company, Explorologist Ltd., sent a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube, claiming copyright in a video posted by the squad. It depicted magician James Randi, a prominent skeptic of the supernatural, showing how Geller could have performed "magic" tricks. (Some of his critics go farther, alleging that Geller is little more than a successful con artist.)
YouTube replied by suspending the relevant account.
There was one problem: Geller doesn't seem to own the video. It's nearly 14 minutes long, and Geller's company apparently can claim copyright in only three seconds of it, a brief excerpt that would likely be permitted by U.S. fair use laws.
That leads to a second problem. The DMCA requires anyone sending a takedown notice to state "under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
If it was in fact only a three-second excerpt, Geller is facing potential legal liability. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is taking advantage of this possible vulnerability -- and seizing a chance to make it a public lesson -- by filing a lawsuit in federal court in northern California on behalf of Brian Sapient. (That's the nom de plume of the fellow whose YouTube account was suspended.) The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday, asks for an injunction against Geller, damages, and attorneys fees.
The Skeptic's Dictionary says this of Geller: "He calls himself a psychic and has sued several people for millions of dollars for saying otherwise. His psychic powers were not sufficient to reveal to him, however, that he would lose all the lawsuits against his critics."
Declan McCullagh, CNET News' chief political correspondent, chronicles the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics, technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan. 
god bless The Rational Response Squad!!! :D
believe any evidence showing how stupid they really are.
Anyone open to the possibilities that this Geller moron is a fraud
doesn't need to see the video to prove it.
The article says it all - he's a psychic who's sued people before
for attempting to show that he's a fraud AND HAS LOST EVERY
TIME. Not very "psychic" of him, now is it. If you KNOW you're
going to lose, why bother strenghening the arguments of your
critics in court?
'Nuff said.
- by cmanncool February 4, 2009 9:04 AM PST
- actually, this article says nothing. you ignore the research done, which makes you exceedingly ignorant. Uri Geller, under close inspection guessed a correct number on a random generator 12 times in a row. the statistical odds of that are 1 in 1 trillion. you deny the possibility because you you're jealous.
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