Uri Geller Accused of Bending Copyright Law 273
JagsLive writes in with a Fox News report about Uri Geller's apparently playing fast and loose with copyright law in order to silence his detractors. "'All it takes is a single e-mail to completely censor someone on the Internet,' said Jason Schultz, a lawyer for the online civil rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is suing Geller over an unflattering clip posted on YouTube for which he claimed a copyright ownership."
And again... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Obviously... (Score:5, Insightful)
IMO that wouldn't mean shit. I personally am waiting for the one that says: "Psychic asked to stop buying lottery tickets".
Geller (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:oh geez (Score:5, Insightful)
One Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obviously... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, we know how gullible the casinos are - a stroll down the Vegas strip is proof of that.
Re:What's good for the goose... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:oh geez (Score:4, Insightful)
Geller does not claim to be a magician, he claims to actually posses mental powers. While many of us know this is silly, many people believe it, and are victimized because of it.
Re:If you support copyright law in any respect... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If you support copyright law in any respect... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because you say it's so, don't make it so.
Geller - biggest douche in universe? (Score:2, Insightful)
What a sad way to live your life. All your achievements are fabrications, and you know that it's only a matter of time before even your most deranged fans realise they've been tricked. Where do you go from there? What are the job options for a notoriously fraudulent spoon bender?
Re:oh geez (Score:2, Insightful)
They are victims of their own faith. It doesn't matter who the huckster is. Just like people who buy from spammers are victims of nothing more than their own greed. They get no sympathy from me.
Re:oh geez (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:oh geez (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And again... (Score:2, Insightful)
He's an attention whore, plain and simple, and these lawsuits are doing exactly what he's hoping they will.
Re:oh geez (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
I call bullshit.
I recorded a video of my cat [youtube.com] a while ago and posted it to YouTube. Copies of it have sprouted up far and wide, uploaded to YouTube and Google Video and all sorts of other places. It got so bad that someone started sending around a bogus e-mail [snopes.com] with the video attached.
It's just a cat flushing the toilet, right? Why should I care?
Well, damnit, it's my cat, and all I want is credit for my own work. It's intolerable to me for others to get to take the credit, but any procedure more costly or onerous than the takedown procedure already in place would not be worth it. And the result would be that I would be disincented to create works and post them to YouTube. So much for promoting the useful arts.
I do agree that those who abuse the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA and send bogus take-down notices need to be walloped. But let's not throw out the baby with the bath water.
Re:Well, what do you expect? (Score:1, Insightful)
It's kinda risky to use wireless mesh networks because it's now a federal pound-me-in-the-ass offense to use an AP that you are not authorized to. What is to keep someone from setting up an open AP and then later reporting everyone as illegally accessing it? Totally stupid, I know.
Uri Gellar is a douchebag... (Score:2, Insightful)
If he did this as a legitimate illusionist, then it would be fine, but he doesn't. And the reason is that he can't actually do magic illusions well enough to make money that way. So he has to use "Volume 1 of brutally simple illusions for completely incompetent idiots." And he commonly resorts to using the legal system to attempt to defend himself. Even if you have a belief in psychics (which I don't)... it's hard not to at least say *this* ratscrotum ain't one of them. Seriously.. He's just shameless and that's why he's still around.
A lot of people have been made fools of by this guy. I credit James Randi with doing the most to assure Uri doesn't make too much money with his bullshit.
This cartoon pretty much sums up how he gets away so long: http://depletedcranium.com/?p=14 [depletedcranium.com]
Re:oh geez (Score:4, Insightful)
Ooh, I was almost with you up until that part.
Most people don't refuse to think analytically. They've just never learned, and their life experiences have not yet shown them the value of acquiring that skill. (Public schools tend to do that.)
Assuming a condescending tone about the Great Unwashed shows, if anything, a lack of analytic thought about the factors that lead to an individual's ability for rational thought, or at least a lack of applying that thought to one's own life. While there are certainly some people (and, in my experience, a terribly small few) who have the ability for reasoned, analytic thought and actually refuse to use it when it would benefit themselves and others, they are vastly outnumbered by people who see no value in that ability which they lack, and may never have the experiences which lead individuals to see that value. Why condemn another based on the intelligence with which fate has bestowed them?
Re:Fraud (Score:4, Insightful)
If you've ever followed the details regarding incidents involving Geller that have happened over the past few decades you'd realize how what he does can be a dangerous thing.
Re:One Solution (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:oh geez (Score:4, Insightful)
I went to Catholic school for 13 years, and several times per day we were reminded of the mysteries of the Trinity and whatnot that we couldn't understand, so we weren't to try. We learned about all the "heretics" who managed to formulate the Church's teachings into something coherent and were sentenced to an eternity in hell. I still hear those things at church every week. This is the religion of a sixth of the world's population.
50% of the population has above-average intelligence. There aren't many people who are genuinely incapable of understanding the world, but there are many who don't bother to try.
Re:Dupe (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:oh geez (Score:2, Insightful)
Beside the point though. Man didn't "evolve from apes."
Man and Ape have a common ancestor, and the divergence was very, very long ago - probably 8 million years ago.
Phylogenists do not put forth the claim that "man evolved from apes."
Hey I went to Catholic school too -- an abbey school staffed by Cistercian monks who were among the last people to leave Hungary before the Russians took over. It was at this school, in a science course taught by a Hungarian Catholic monk, that I first heard the details of evolution explained in a proper way with respect to the prevailing theories and the scientific method.
>50% of the population has above-average intelligence.
That might make a good bumper sticker, but it's not a realistic or reasonable way of looking at the curve.
Re:Honestly, I disagree with that. (Score:3, Insightful)
are you serious? (Score:3, Insightful)
That still includes Uri, then (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Uri Geller himself claims that he has been employed by some companies to dowse for minerals or oil, though none actually admitted it. I'm sorry, but if that's true, that's _exactly_ fraud. He's taken some money for a service he can't provide, and based on some qualifications which are bogus.
2. There is a lot of damage done even indirectly in claiming to actually have psychic powers or being able to see into the future, for example by convincing people to lose their money on predictions and courses of action which don't work.
E.g., Uri Geller himself often tells people on what sports teams to bet, but it turns out most of the time his picks lose. E.g., dowsing, in addition to the money actually taken for providing that bogus service, usually results in a company wasting a lot of money to actually drill there. The whole buying the rights, hauling the equipment there, salaries, etc, adds up to a fair sum.
And while in this case it just boils down to money and faceless corporations, so I can imagine some people wouldn't feel much empathy there, but other quacks cause a lot more damage to normal people like you and me. E.g., psychic healers and the like routinely tell people to stop taking medicine, and are responsible for quite a few deaths. There have been even cases where some psychic or "holistic" healer quack told even people with _cancer_ to not have an operation, not take medicine, and ffs not even take the pain killers. So the they effectively have on their conscience (that is, if they had a conscience) causing someone to die in horrible pain over several months. How's that for damage done?
Way I see it, even if it's not done for money, convincing people to do harm to themselves is still morally wrong. And society as a whole already decided that the worst cases of it should be illegal. E.g., entrapment is not just morally wrong, but legally wrong too. E.g., claiming to be a medical doctor without a diploma is illegal in most places. Etc.
I don't have a problem there with those who admit they're just doing entertainment tricks, because then the audience knows it's just entertainment and won't base their RL decisions on it. E.g., not many people go and stake someone because they just saw a vampire movie. But claiming such powers to be real and giving people advice from a position of knowledgeable authority is an entirely different thing.
3. A lot of the charlatans claiming powers and secret knowledge are busy overtly attacking science and the scientific method, to make it easier for themselves to get their credentials accepted. This causes society as a whole a lot more harm than you'd think. If nothing else, by making more people susceptible to be harmed by the con artists from points 1 and 2.
But then that's the happy case, if only that was the damage done. It often causes people in positions of power and responsibility to put their funding and support in the quack camp, instead of doing some real science. When I hear stuff like corporations using numerology to thin the candidates pool, or using dowsing to find out where to drill next, that's not just directly X money which could be used on a more scientific approach and maybe discover something. That's also indication of a state of mind of trusting quacks over scientists, and I just don't see that company investing in scientific research the rest of the time.
To get back to Uri Geller, again, that's what he actively does all the time. To establish his credentials as the uber-psychic, he _has_ to attack the normal science, and that he does plenty.
So basically, to wrap this long rant up, there is no such thing as merely "hard" and "soft" psychics. "Hard" in that case invariably means a con artist who, directly or indirectly, does actual harm and is morally reprehensible in doing so. The question isn't just whether they bluff about their actual talents, but what actual harm they do based on that claim, or to support that claim.