A PBS NewsHour segment recently discussed protests in Cairo, Egypt, following the anti-Muslim film trailer that sparked other riots across the Middle East. The segment also includes a discussion about the individual who made the film, “Innocence of Muslims.” Los Angeles Times writer Rebecca Keegan says in the video that many of people who were cast in the film responded to Craigslist casting Web site ads for a movie called “Desert Warrior,” which she says “was supposed to be some sort of adventure film.”
“They say that their dialogue was dubbed, they didn’t deliver many of the movie’s most inflammatory lines,” Keegan says in the video. “The ones who I have spoken to said they were paid in cash, about $75 a day, and they thought this was your average low-budget, low-quality production.”
On September 27, 2012, the Washington Post reported that one actress who appeared in the film is now citing copyright infringement in a lawsuit filed against YouTube, parent company Google Inc., and the filmmaker. Cindy Lee Garcia claims in her lawsuit that Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the man behind the video, violated her copyright when he posted the trailer on YouTube.
Garcia indeed thought she was acting in “Desert Warrior,” and said there were no references to Muslims or Muhammad in the script she saw. According to the Post, “Garcia maintains that because she never signed a release transferring her intellectual property rights to Nakoula or a production company, she is a copyright holder and her interests remain intact under federal law.”
The Post reported that a similar motion sought by Garcia to have the trailer removed from YouTube was denied the previous week by a Los Angeles Superior Court judge who said the actress was “unlikely to prevail on the merits of her case.”
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