The case was a hard one. The plaintiff was sympathetic, the facts were bad, and the law was—Kozinski aside—straightforward. Cindy Garcia had been tricked into acting in the film The Innocence of Muslims. Her dialogue was later dubbed over to be insulting to the prophet Mohammed. Later the film’s controversial nature would play an odd role in geopolitics. At one point, the State Department would blame the film for inciting the attack on the Benghazi embassy.
Meanwhile, Garcia was receiving a barrage of threats due to her role in the film. She feared for her safety. The film’s producers, who had tricked her, had vanished into thin air. She couldn’t get justice from them, so she had to settle for something different. Garcia wanted the film taken offline—and she wanted the courts to force YouTube to do it.
Garcia had first tried to use the DMCA to ask YouTube to take the film down. YouTube wouldn’t honor her request. Their reasoning was simple: the DMCA is a process for removing copyrighted content, not offensive or threatening material. While Garcia’s motivations were eminently understandable, her legal case was null. The copyright owner of the trailer for The Innocence of Muslims was Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, not Garcia.
[…]When people are harassed on the internet, the instinctive feeling of those targeted is that the internet is out of control and must be reined in. The most prominent and broad regulation of the internet is through copyright, as publicized in the thousands of lawsuits that the Recording Industry Association of America launched against individual downloaders, the subpoenas the RIAA issued to the ISPs to unmask downloaders, and the RIAA and MPAA’s massive lawsuits against the Napsters, Groksters, and even YouTubes of the world.
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