The Robert Lappin Charitable Foundation retained Gil Baker to produce a documentary dedicated to celebrating the contributions and accomplishments of notable Jews entitled, “Great Jewish Achievers” (JGA). The deal provided that Lappin was to provide specific suggestions, be responsible for all “final decisions” as the movie was Lappins’ “brain child”. Lappin paid $177,500; however Baker sued claiming that the payment was instead to have been funding an unrelated full length film “Bungalow Six”.

Baker sued claiming total ownership of the GJA film and damages of $500,000 both for copyright infringement and failure to fund the “Bungalow Six”. Baker claimed to own the movie as sole author.

The federal trial judge dismissed the action in Gil Baker v. The Robert L. Chappin Charitable Foundation No. 04-Civ-426, S.D. N.; 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 7113 holding that plaintiff and defendant are co-authors and as such, Baker had no standing to sue defendant.

Specifically, the court held that defendant non profit was a copyright author ‘even assuming that Chappin was not present in the editing room when the film was edited, as Baker alleges, the law does not require that joint authors work together in the same place or contribute to every aspect of the project.” That the nonprofit contributed material to the movie that were independent copyrightable contributions which were more than ‘de minimis’ and that were intended to form a ‘unitary whole’ with Baker’s contribution made the work a jointly authored one.

This entry was posted by Kate Spelman on Sunday, April 23rd, 2006 at 5:16 am and is filed under Copyrights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.