According to "US court orders removal of anti-Islam film from YouTube", actress Cindy Lee Garcia has obtained a US court order which requires Google to remove from YouTube the video Innocence of Muslims, which "defies Islamic belief and offends Muslims" by "satirising and mocking" the Prophet Mohammed, which had caused riots across the Muslim world when it appeared in 2012 (2014). The court's reason is not that the film offended religious beliefs, but that Garcia has copyright ownership in it.
Unfortunately (or is it fortunately?) I can't include a link to the YouTube video that this fuss is about since, as a law abiding US juristic person, Google has already taken the video off YouTube, although it is also appealing the court's decision. Although I almost always oppose censorship, strongly favouring free speech, in this case, I think that the woman does have a case. As the article reports that the judges said in supporting their ruling, "Garcia owned the copyright to her performance because she had agreed to appear in a film far different than the one ultimately produced" ("US Court Orders", 2014, "Threats" section). Whilst the copyright to a film normally belongs to the people who produce it, in this case, the actress was tricked into making this film, so could not have agreed to sign over ownership to the producer of something she did not know she was making. Thus, her request that it be removed from YouTube should be respected.
I did watch Innocence of Muslims when it was published in July 2012. It is a truly awful piece of rubbish: badly made, with stupid dialogue and not at all interesting. At least, it wasn't interesting until Muslims made it interesting by protesting and becoming violent, including issuing fatwas, religious death sentences. This made the short film famous. The Muslims who were deeply outraged and killing were acting in the name of their father god - Allah, who is much the same as the god of the Christians, from which Islam is descended, and Christianity is descended from Judaism, from which it inherited a fairly violent god in addition to an intolerant, often immoral, set of teachings.
The interesting question for me is whether or not such pieces of work as this ugly video, which are certainly, in this case intentionally, offensive to the beliefs of other people should be banned for the reason that they are offensive. I think definitely not: merely causing offence, even great offence to a large majority, is not and cannot be a good reason to ban or censor a piece of work. As we regularly see in class, in order to correct misunderstandings and errors, it is first necessary that those wrong beliefs can be said to be wrong. If we could not say of some belief, "That's wrong / false / immoral," or the like, then any errors cannot be corrected, our opinions cannot be improved. I think that rational people do want their beliefs to be true, or at least closer to truth rather than farther away from it, and if the necessary free speech is not allowed, this is impossible. Many religious people seem to prefer making it impossible to correct false opinions.
Also, if causing offence to some or many were a good reason to ban something, then almost everything would have to be banned: many people are offended by the unsupported claims about gods, heavens, hells, spirits, souls, angels, demons, miracles, reincarnation and the like that are common in religions, which means much in every religion would be banned if causing offence is a good reason to censor!
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I'm not entirely happy with my summary here. It's a bit longer than I would like.
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