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More on veteran's suit against Michael Moore

Here's an article with some legal details. It looks as if CBS, who filmed the initial interview, didn't get a written release (relying upon the implicit consent idea -- if a person consents to be filmed for CBS, he implicitly consents to their airing the footage -- and informed Moore that he was responsible for getting consent from anyone in the footage.

They add they can't imagine Moore going ahead without getting the consent. But as Jason Clarke and I showed in our book (see left margin), he did it in other cases -- taking a letter to the editor and retypesetting it as if it were a headline, under a newspaper's masthead, without their consent. And he lost a suit over false portraying of a fellow in "Roger and Me."

[UPDATE in light of comments on the issue: the suit appears to be for invasion of privacy, or to be precise, two subsets of that. (1) You can't use someone's image for profit (with certain exceptions) unless they consent and (2) you can't hold them out in a "false light" -- as being, or doing, or feeling, that which they aren't. The latter is a little like defamation, but doesn't involve actually *saying* something about them, and can include portrayal that is not necessarily defamatory. Classic example was Moore's loss over Roger and Me. He'd taken a guy, a friend of his, and filmed him at a "Roaring 20s" theme fundraiser for charity. Asked him to say good things about Flint. He took the resulting footage of what looks like a wealthy guy partying in costume and saying Flint is just great, has all thse cultural things, and spliced it next to footage of street people rummaging thru garbage. Not defamatory, because he never *said* "this guy is a crass, rich fellow who is indifferent to all the poverty in Flint," but the court found he certainly created that image.

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Posted by: Sebastian at June 2, 2006 02:23 PM

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