Yoko Ono Sues Producers of Expelled Movie

I'm a bit late to this, but the Associated Press reported yesterday that Yoko Ono is suing the producers of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed for the use of John Lennon's "Imagine." From the article:

In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Manhattan, Ono accuses the producers of ''Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed'' of suggesting to viewers that those who guard John Lennon's legacy somehow authorized or sponsored the film.

[...]

Ono's lawsuit claims the producers did not ask for permission either because they knew they couldn't get it or because they did not want to pay for the rights. It objects to the way ''Imagine'' is listed in the film's credits, saying it suggested to members of the news media and others that the song's use had been approved.

''Internet 'bloggers' immediately began accusing Mrs. Lennon of 'selling out' by licensing the song to defendants,'' says the complaint, filed this week.

The producers have claimed fair use, but as has already been pointed out at Sivacracy, I think it's unlikely that that defense will hold up. I'm interested to see how this turn out, not only because I'd like for nothing else than the financial ruin of the producers of a film littered with distortions, misinformation, and lies, but also to see the ruling regarding fair use.

I think Ono has a strong case, as the producers of Expelled clearly fail on factor (1) on the US copyright website describing fair use. I also think that Ono could make a case regarding factor (4) considering the negative publicity she has received because of the song's appearance in Expelled.

This isn't the only copyright infringement that has gotten Expelled into hot water, either. As PZ Myers pointed out, several of the animations appear to be plagiarisms of existing cellular animations by XVIVO and PBS. I'm not so sure that the animations infringement claim is strong enough to provide a case for either XVIVO or PBS to file suit, but Ono's case is solid.

The New Feudalism

Via Mike the Mad Biologist over at Scienceblogs.com, I came across this from Mahablog:

Those of us who were children in the 1950s and 1960s got so used to economic times getting better and better that we assumed that was the way the world would always be. Any slowdowns were just temporary glitches. In the early 1980s, when mortgage rates went through the roof, lots of my contemporaries cheerfully took out balloon mortgages because of course in five years they’d be making a lot more money. But, as a rule, they didn’t. Now I think most people have stopped expecting. They’re just hoping to hang on to what they have.

I’ve believed for a long time that much of America’s prosperity — whatever’s left of it, anyway — has been floating on the wealth created in the postwar years. That’s when all those veterans got college degrees on the GI Bill and went out and started businesses or created new products. That’s when all those middle-class couples, booming with babies, bought their first houses with mortgages subsidized by the U.S. government. That left with them income to buy new refrigerators and cars and television sets, growing the refrigerator and car and television set industries in America. It was win/win for everybody. [emphasis mine]

The bolded section is what those on the Right -- arbiters of "supply-side economics," "voodoo economics," and "trickle-down theory" -- would like to pretend has nothing to do with economic growth. The principle is quite simple; pay workers enough to purchase what they produce, and the economy will grow. Mahablog quotes Rick Wolff:

From 1973 to 2005, this is what happened to the 80 percent of US workers in non-supervisory jobs. Their hourly wages — adjusted for inflation — rose from $15.76 to $16.11. That is, over a 32 year period, most US workers enjoyed a stunning 2 percent increase in what their hourly pay could buy. Because their work weeks shortened over those years, their real weekly pay — what they could actually afford for a week’s pay — actually fell from $581.67 to $543.65, a decline of 6.5 percent. This means that workers’ wages could buy less in 2005 than in 1973.

Over the same thirty years, US workers produced 75 percent more. In the language of economics, that’s how much output per worker — “productivity” — rose. Corporations got 75 percent more goods and services produced per worker. They sold that extra output and thus got much more revenue and profit per worker employed. Yet what they paid those workers did not rise. Stagnant wages did not allow the workers to buy any of the extra output they produced.

The numbers on productivity and real wages before then — from 1945 to 1975 — were very different. Productivity rose much faster then than afterward. But the big difference is what happened to real wages: hourly, they rose 75 percent from 1947 to 1972, while weekly they rose 61 percent. In other words, US workers wages then rose with their higher productivity — exactly what stopped happening after the mid-1970s.

The welfare state economy of 1945 to 1975 was driven by two interconnected fears: of lapsing back into the Great Depression and of succumbing to socialism. History reduced those fears enough so that, after 1975, business could undo the New Deal and go back to the pre-1929 gaps between rich and poor. Most paid commentators cheer the business reaction as if it were good for everyone, but workers suffering the new sub-prime economy may reckon differently. The explosion of workers’ debts has postponed that reckoning. So too have fundamentalism, escapism, and the noise from all those commentators.

Read the whole thing.