Mother of teen 'sex addict' sues 'Tyra' show

By Eriq Gardner

EXCLUSIVE: Next on "The Tyra Banks Show": TV producers who kidnap teenaged sex addicts?

The mother of a 15-year-old self-proclaimed "sex addict" is suing Warner Bros. Entertainment, Tyra Banks and executive producers of her talk show for $3 million for featuring her child on television without consent.

Beverly McClendon, a resident of Georgia, filed the complaint in an Atlanta federal court last week, after her daughter seemingly went behind her back and flew to New York to appear on "Tyra." The lawsuit opens up questions about the care of duty owed when producers of a TV program invite minors on air to speak about their sexual proclivity. 

Actress sues over inclusion in Green Day musical promo

By Eriq Gardner

EXCLUSIVE: Producers of "American Idiot," the anti-establishment Broadway adaptation of a Green Day album, have been sued by a former cast member who isn't happy about the way she's been exploited.

Morgan Weed, who served as an understudy for the lead female role of "Whatshername," claims in a new lawsuit that the production company filmed her performing in rehearsals without consent and used the footage to promote the show on television, in print and online. 

Ironically, "American Idiot" is a song about an individual rebelling against the propaganda of a media-saturated society. Weed's lawsuit alleges that producers misappropriated her identity and likeness and caused her emotional distress by blasting her image in its promo campaign.

Class action says media companies deploy 'zombie cookies'

By Eriq Gardner

Some top entertainment companies are being accused of secretly spying on the online habits of their website users.

A new class action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in California targets NBC Universal, MTV Networks, Hulu, JibJab Media, MySpace, ABC, ESPN, and Scribd.

The individual plaintiffs accuse the media companies of using Flash cookies to "respawn" deleted HTTP cookies. In other words, even if Internet users clear their Internet browsers of data files tracking a user's web surfing, the companies allegedly can harvest consumers' personal information anyway.

Many websites place "cookies" on visitors' computers so as to gather information for advertising purposes. The class action asserts that the companies fail to disclose the use of so-called "zombie cookies" in their privacy policies.

The 119-page complaint quotes George Orwell and demands unspecified monetary damages.

MTV denies woman was drunk in 'Real World' lawsuit

By Eriq Gardner

As "The Real World" kicks off its 24th season tonight with a return to New Orleans, the show's producers are fighting back against a woman who claims she was humiliated on the previous Washington D.C. season.

Viacom, MTV and producer Bunim-Murray have answered the $5 million lawsuit, filed last month in US District Court in Washington by Golzar Amirmotazedi, who claims she was given 8 to 10 alcoholic beverages and ridiculed when she refused to have sex with one of the show's cast members.

In pushing her claims of privacy violations and infliction of emotional distress, Amirmotazedi asserts that she was too inebriated to sign a lawful waiver. What say the defendants? Not drunk!

'Female Forces' lawsuit is next on A&E docket

By Eriq Gardner

There's something about A&E's distinctive brand of reality TV — voyeuristic and willing to explore touchy subjects like drug addiction, health issues and Steven Seagal — that has made it a prime target for lawsuits.

The latest claim comes from a man who says he was humiliated when cops on A&E's "Female Forces" stopped his vehicle and charged him with driving with a suspended license. According to the complaint, Matt Coan says he refused to sign a release, but the show aired his arrest anyway (it featured him becoming ill and throwing up in custody). 

Coan says the footage was staged, edited and sensationalized in an effort to demean him. He's suing in federal court in Chicago, claiming his civil rights were violated.

This isn't the first time that A&E has been caught up in a reality TV legal battle.

'Hurt Locker' producers drop First Amendment bomb on Iraq War vet

By Eriq Gardner

EXCLUSIVE: Producers of "The Hurt Locker" are firing back against the Iraq War veteran who claimed that his life story was ripped off to create the Academy Award-winning drama.

Master Sgt. Jeffrey S. Sarver filed his case with much fanfare just days before the film won best picture at the Oscars in March. He says the depiction of an Army bomb squad was a thinly veiled account of his own story. 

According to Sarver's complaint, journalist/screenwriter Mark Boal breached an agreement with the U.S. military that restricted the reporting of detailed personal information about service members. Sarver says the information was used in Boal's Playboy article and then the screenplay for "The Hurt Locker," and that the depiction of the character of Will James violated his publicity rights, defamed him and caused emotional stress.

But now the defendants, including Summit Entertainment, Voltage Pictures, Boal, director/producer Kathryn Bigelow and others, have responded to the complaint with a motion to dismiss.

Can Hollywood scriptwriters base a story on their own family?

By Eriq Gardner

A Nevada woman claims her privacy was violated when her uncle — a successful Hollywood scriptwriter — authored a movie allegedly based on her own personal issues. 

Alix Daily is suing Peter and Leslie Tolan, Capacity Pictures, and Creative Artists Agency over the 2008 film, "Finding Amanda," starring Matthew Broderick and Brittany Snow.

The plaintiff is the niece of Peter Tolan, whose credits include "Analyze This," "Just Like Heaven," and "My Fellow Americans."

Daily claims in her lawsuit that she suffered from sensitive medical and psychological issues that caused members of her family to stage a real-life intervention. 

Based on this episode, Tolan allegedly created his autobiographical story. "Finding Amanda" is about a Hollywood screenwriter who goes to Las Vegas to find his 20-year-old niece, who has become a hooker there, and try to get her to come home and enter a rehab facility. 

The complaint says much of the dialogue, facts, and events really happened, and that the character of Amanda looked, dressed, and behaved like Daily. The film's producers allegedly did little to disguise the story was based on real events.

Claiming she never consented, Daily is suing for infliction of emotional distress and invasion of privacy.

UPDATE: Here's the complaint.

Google Buzz could cause legal problems in Hollywood

By Eriq Gardner

Google has been taking a lot of heat since Tuesday's launch of a new social-networking feature called Buzz that allows users to post status updates to contacts and make comments on other people's updates. Most controversially, Google Buzz allows people by default to see who their contacts e-mail and chat with most.

This could be a problem in Hollywood, especially among lawyers and agents.

Privacy Wars: Netflix, Facebook and the 'Brokeback Mountain Effect'

By Eriq Gardner

Will "Brokeback Mountain" shape rules concerning the responsibility of websites to guard user privacy?

The debate over privacy on the Internet got much louder yesterday when a group of privacy advocate organizations filed a complaint with the FTC over recent changes made by Facebook to user information seen by the public. Meanwhile, a class action lawsuit was filed yesterday against Netflix for breaking various privacy codes when the video rental service held a contest and released information about its users' preferences.

Let's take the Netflix case first — a possible path-breaking piece of litigation that has the potential to influence the Facebook debate.

The lawsuit was filed by a group of individuals lead by a Jane Doe who identifies herself only as a lesbian. In the complaint, the plaintiffs take issue with a contest that Netflix ran in October 2006 where the company offered $1 million to anybody who could come up with an algorithm to improve upon its movie recommendation engine by 10 percent. Netflix opened the contest to the public and gave participants a lot of data, including 100 million subscriber movie ratings.

A few weeks after the contest began, researchers at the University of Texas published a paper entitled, "How to Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset," describing a method of unmasking that compared Netflix ratings with those made on Internet Movie Database. The researchers wrote they were able to uncover political preferences and other sensitive information of its users. 

The plaintiffs call this the "Brokeback Mountain Factor," referring to an idea that anybody who has the movie in their queue is more likely to be homosexual. (Last year, we wrote a cover article for Psychology Today describing how scientists were using taste preferences to glean revealing information about individuals.) 

The lawsuit argues that Netflix broke its own privacy policy, seeks $2,500 in damages for each of its more than 2 million users, and asks for an enjoinment from launching a second contest that will give out user data including ZIP codes, age, and gender with movie ratings.

The same day this lawsuit was filed, the FTC got a complaint over recent changes made by Facebook that has opened up to the public user information including names, friends and fan pages. The filing includes quotes by aggrieved users but is somewhat short on real examples of the damage potentially caused to Facebook's users.

We're guessing that some will soon connect the dots here and push the FTC to recognize threats of data mining in the alleged privacy breach.

Is Arnold's new anti-paparazzi law unconstitutional?

By Eriq Gardner

Since giving up an acting career for life in California's governor's mansion, Arnold Schwarzenegger has made it one of his political missions to make life tough for intrusive paparazzi.

Schwarzenegger has enacted laws that expand privacy protections and punish photographers for assaults and altercations. He's endorsed the idea of a "celebrity buffer zone" and now he's signed a bill that's the most assertive yet in cracking down on paparazzi intrusion.

Maybe the Governator has gone too far this time.

Specifically, the new law will impose liability on those who knowingly publish or broadcast material that's unlawfully obtained and violates state statutes for constructive invasion of privacy. Sounds fair, right? The law is being read by many as an "anti-paparazzi law" but we're pretty sure a court will soon give this statute a thorough First Amendment shakedown to see if it interferes with less offensive news-gathering.

In recent decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has been extremely leery of laws that encroach upon First Amendment protections without a compelling government interest. The high court has made it tougher for plaintiffs to sue for libel and defamation, but what about invasion of privacy? In cases like Cox Broadcasting Corp. v. Cohn, the Court seemed to be skeptical that a State could ever "define and protect an area of privacy free from unwanted publicity in the press" without fully resolving the question.

Upon consideration in the California legislature, the anti-paparazzi law was attacked by the ACLU, the California Newspaper Publishers Association and the Radio Television Digital News Association, who warned potential defendants would have a significant burden at trial to prove no actual knowledge of an unlawfully obtained image. The RTDNA added that litigation costs would cause risk-adverse news organizations into self-censorship.

California could become to privacy what the U.K. is to defamation, but before that happens, there should be a significant courtroom challenge on this new law.