Footage of Dr. Phil Allegedly Imprisoning Woman Leads to Novel Copyright Decision [View all]

[steve2470]

http://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/footage-of-dr-phil-allegedly-imprisoning-woman-leads-to-novel-copyright-decision/ar-AAr5XPR?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp

First, the actual decision: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3985661-Gov-Uscourts-Txed-176701-44-0.html?utm_source=Microsoft&utm_campaign=Syndication&utm_medium=Footage+of+Dr.+Phil+Allegedly+Imprisoning+Woman+Leads+to+Novel+Copyright+Decision

now the excerpt from article:

In 2015, television personality Dr. Phil McGraw was sued by Leah Rothman, who worked as a segment director on his show for 12 years. She alleges suffering emotional distress and imprisonment when during a meeting, Dr. Phil locked the door, yelled profanities and threatened employees for supposedly leaking internal information to the press. Before she sued, Rothman attempted to get evidence by accessing a database of videos from the Dr. Phil Show archives and recording on her iPhone a nine-second clip of what happened.

In response, Peteski Productions - Dr. Phil's company - obtained a registered copyright on those nine seconds of video and filed a lawsuit alleging infringement against Rothman in Texas federal court.

That's led to a novel decision from U.S. District Court Judge Rodney Gilstrap about whether Rothman's use of the nine-second video was a fair use under copyright law. On Thursday, Gilstrap handed Dr. Phil the victory by granting Peteski summary judgment on the fair use issue.

In arriving at the decision (read the opinion here in full), the judge first examines Rothman's conduct upon Peteski arguments that bad faith weighs against a finding of fair use. That brings the judge to examining and comparing the situation to the one discussed in a 1985 Supreme Court opinion concerning how The Nation exploited a purloined unpublished manuscript of President Gerald Ford's autobiography.