Gilliam v. American Broadcasting Companies, Inc.

Gilliam v. American Broadcasting Companies, Inc.
Court	United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
Full case name	Terry GILLIAM et al., v. AMERICAN BROADCASTING COMPANIES, INC.
Argued	13 April 1976
Decided	30 June 1976
Citation(s)	538 F.2d 14 (2d. Cir. 1976)
Case opinions
The edited version broadcast by ABC impaired the integrity of appellants' work and represented to the public as the product of appellants what was actually a mere caricature of their talents.
Court membership
Judge(s) sitting	Lumbard, Hays and Gurfein
Keywords
copyright infringement

Gilliam v. American Broadcasting (2d Cir. 1976) was a case where the British comedy group Monty Python claimed that the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) had violated their copyright and caused damage to their artistic reputation by broadcasting drastically edited versions of several of their shows. An appeals court found in favor of Monty Python, directing a ban of further broadcasts by ABC on the basis of violation of the Lanham Act, which could provide protection in the United States similar to that provided by moral rights in Europe, and gave the opinion that the group's copyright had probably also been infringed.

Monty Python had made a series of half-hour comedy shows for the BBC. The group retained the copyright of the script for each show, with a clearly defined agreement under which the BBC could request certain minimal changes to the script before the show was recorded, but all other rights were reserved to Monty Python. The BBC had the right to license the shows, and had allowed some of the shows to be broadcast in their entirety in the United States, mostly by non-profit public broadcasting networks but in two cases by commercial networks.

The BBC granted a license to Time–Life to distribute some of the shows in the United States, and ABC obtained the rights to broadcast six of these shows as two ninety-minute specials. At the request of ABC, Time–Life edited the shows to remove 24 minutes of content, in part to create space for advertisements and in part because some of the material was considered by ABC to be unsuitable for American audiences. Monty Python had been reassured that the programs would be broadcast uncut, and did not discover the drastic editing until several weeks after the first broadcast. After trying without success to get ABC to agree not to cut the shows in the second special, they asked the district court to prevent broadcast of the second special and to award damages for the first broadcast.

The district court found that the editing had indeed impaired the integrity of the work, and had caused irreparable damage. That is, some of the people who had seen their mutilated work would not watch further episodes and would not become Monty Python fans. On the other hand, the judge found that if ABC were to withdraw the second special from their program a few days before the date that had been announced in TV schedules, ABC would also suffer damage. Since the ownership of copyright in the shows was not clear, and since the judge felt that Monty Python had been slow to make their complaint, he refused to enjoin ABC from making the second broadcast, but did agree that ABC should broadcast that Monty Python objected to the editing. In the end, a watered-down disclaimer was broadcast saying only that ABC had edited the shows. Monty Python appealed this ruling.

...
Wikipedia