Remember Yoko Ono’s long standing feud with Ben Stein and his creationist doc, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” which used part of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” without consent from his estate?
Last we left off in this case, “Expelled” was being re-released for the summer (it did surprisingly well at the box-office for a documentary) and Ono had lost her initial lawsuit when Stein and Creation Media (the people behind ‘Expelled’) hid behind the fair-use doctrine.
Well Ono and EMI have dropped their copyright infringement lawsuits against the makers of a documentary because they were basically never going to win and they knew it. Fair-use is an important doctrine, but it still seems fucked up, that shifty-propaganda-ists like Creation media can use songs in their films without your consent. They did the same thing to indie-rockers The Killers and basically lied to them to get one of their songs in the film and the trick worked [Reuters]