Everyone wants to be a celebrity assistant, but some celebs don't want to play along. Gabrielle Union's suing some Georgia-based pranksters who advertised, via Craigslist, for an worker bee to assist the actress.

Here's the sad part--no one, other than a friend, answered the ad.

Union did not have such a staff opening, does not know the defendants and never authorized them to act on her behalf, the complaint says.

But who can blame her for being touchy? She'd survived a brutal attack back when she was 19, (thanks to the lessons she learned from watching Oprah).

Allison Hope Weiner might want to do some research into the curious case of Jim Taricani, the Providence, RI investigative reporter who did 6 months for refusing to name a source.

Weiner, readers may recall, got served a temporary restraining order aimed at stopping her from posting audio tapes of Anthony Pellicano and his clients on her HuffPost blog. The NY Times made the tapes available as well (Pellicano and his indicted lawyer Terry N. Christensen), but where's their TRO? Christensen's trial will start about a month after Pellicano's ends, and his legal team says that the tapes compromise his right to a fair trial.

The NYT has lawyers just sitting around, waiting for someone to try interfere with freedom of the press, but is the Huffington Post likely to stand by their blogger? Weiner's represented by Theodore J. Boutrous Jr. of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher. The hearing hasn't been scheduled yet.

While covering the Plunder Gate case of former Providence mayor Vincent A. "Buddy" Cianci Jr, Tarcani received a surveillance tape from a source to whom he promised anonymity, and aired it, in defiance of a federal court order against the dissemination of such evidence. He was cited for contempt of court, fines ratcheted up, and he did 6 months of home confinement, with NBC underwriting his legal defense.

Robert Iafolla, writing in the LA Daily Journal, takes the "it can't happen here" tone. Weiner's CDs were subject to a protective order issued in April 2006, although she's not actually bound by that order. It's a safe bet that Pellicano didn't give them to her, and unlikely that she found them at a yard sale, so that leaves, oh, who knows? the defense team?

The whole motion is probably designed not to not put a gag order on Weiner but to get her testimony per the source of whoever actually violated the protective order. Or course, that puts the Huffington Post in an uncomfortable spot.

Earlier:
HuffPo Blogger Weiner Served --Restraining Order at Pellicano Trial

More Pellicano madness--HuffPo blogger Allison Hope Weiner has been covering the trial, and got slapped with a restraining order for posting audio tapes from the trial on the site.

She already was barred from the jail for leaning on her Calfornia State Bar membership to gain access to Pellicano, back when she worked the story for the NY Times. There, she co-wrote a story about reining in the paparazzi. Tricks of the trade.

The Huffington Post is reporting that, if called to testify, "attorney to the stars" Bert Fields will take the fifth amendment in the trial of Anthony Pellicano.

Fields has been widely reported to have hired Pellicano numerous times over the years.

We thought it was a school teacher. How many more LIES can be associated with this product?!

Ahem. Page Six reports:

WHEN screenwriter Rider McDowell (Wimbledon and Mercy Man) called Page Six seven years ago promoting Airborne, the new cold remedy he and his wife, Victoria, had invented, little did we know how big a success it would become - so big, the McDowells just agreed to pay $23.3 million in refunds to consumers who were misled by advertising claims that the herbal supplement actually prevents colds.

Okay, so it doesn't prevent colds.

The entry continues:

McDowell told us at the time he deserved some credit for the conception of Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick's just-born son, James, 5. Seems the couple had been planning a trip to Greece and Italy nine months earlier and didn't want to board a germ-packed plane without taking Airborne, which wasn't for sale at the time in New York. McDowell had a bottle of the fizzie tablets, loaded with Vitamins A and C and zinc, delivered to them, and the rest is history.

So it's also crappy birth control.

Where's the settlement for that?

Things are moving along in the Anthony Pellicano trial. FBLA has learned that the plea deals for retired police sergeant Mark Arneson and telephone company ex-employee Ray Turner (reported yesterday in Radar) have broken down. The pair were hoping to plead guilty only to charges not including RICO statutes.

Arneson was charged with supplying Pellicano with personal and private information through the illegal use of his police computers, and Turner is accused of helping set up the illegal wiretaps.

The FBI has notified witnesses (and their lawyers) to get ready.

It's a case of 'art' imitating life. Err, 'life' imitating art. Something.

In a viewing of The Signal described by MovieFone:

...the denizens of Terminus City fall prey to a mysterious transmission that pulses through all electronic devices and transforms rational, sane people into murderous, rampaging psychopaths

With the tag in the trailer stating, "They just decided to kill people..."

From LAT:

Police are searching for a man suspected of stabbing two people who were watching a bloody horror movie in a Fullerton theater Sunday night, in what authorities describe as a random attack.

The male suspect stood over a lone moviegoer in the AMC theater in the 1000 block of South Lemon Street and stabbed him at about 7:30 p.m. after "The Signal" had begun. He then walked toward the rear exit of the theater, where he stabbed the second victim, police said.

Didn't a tornado hit a drive-in during a screening of Twister?

Fox Searchlight wasted no time in defending their girl, Diablo Cody. Big Ross at CC2K, got slapped with a cease and desist for daring to read and critize Jennifer's Body.

Considering Juno's accolades, detractors abound:

Judging by the cease and desist orders sent by FOX to the websites running script reviews of her next opus Jennifer's Body this week, it's clear that the publicity machine running on overdrive behind her for the past few months is doing what they can to prevent anything or anyone from getting in the way of this processed fairytale.

Casting for the horror film is underway:

two names that are being bandied about for Nikolai; he's the leader of the Satanic emo band that starts all of the problems that turns Needy into an ass-kicking monster fighter. The production is looking at two legitimately emo dipshits--Pete Wentz of Fallout Boy and Joel Madden of Good Charlotte.

Earlier:
Jennifer's Body Script Reviewed

Following up on yesterday's post about Cory Doctorow and the perplexing problem of copyright is Ubiquitous Learning (upcoming from University of Illinois Press) Jack Brighton, a prof at UIIC and one of the contributors to the book, writes:

Just a century ago most Americans celebrated their arts and cultural heritage by actively participating in them. Before we had access to mass-produced news and entertainment, we made our own. People told family stories and shared what news they had, made more dear by its scarcity. Families made music together, and the influx of musical traditions and instruments fueled an American folk music culture that lead to Jazz, Blues, and their offspring. "Everyone was encouraged to take part, both men and women, from practiced musicians to visitors and children, and in the nineteenth-century home the quality might at times be excellent," writes music historian Tim Brookes. "Yet in a sense that was not the point...it was an active, participatory tradition as opposed to the passive listening to radio and recordings."

He goes on:

Is it any great surprise then that in a moment when folk practices are in digital renaissance, many of the same mass media stories, images, and sounds are being reclaimed and remade on YouTube, Boing Boing, Ourmedia.org, and blogs everywhere? The content currency of the emerging online media commons highlights the power and cultural resonance of twentieth century mass media industries, but there is a fundamental difference: we are reclaiming our own voices, and making the stories our own.

continued...

Cory Doctorow, relentless champion of no stinkin' copyrights, has a piece in The Guardian (UK) that starts off with a fatal flaw, right from the jump:

In theory, there's just one set of copyright rules and they apply to everyone, from Sony Pictures to your neighbour's eight-year-old who wants to photocopy his Spider-Man comics and sell them to the other kids.

What kid does this? Who's dumb enough to buy some crappy copy of a comic?

Doctorow goes on about how the internet has made "folk-users" bolder in their appropriation of the creative works of others, with horrible repercussions. He cites

Now you have billionaire media empires behaving as though parents should get a licence for a Prince song before they upload a YouTube video of their adorable toddler dancing to it.

Adorable toddlers dancing to Prince should be hunted down, taken away from their parents, and kept in a suitable institution, far away from video cameras. The parents should be whipped. But we digress.

He goes on about writers of fan-fiction, people uploading videos of jolly singalongs, and other such "cultural" uses (his word, not ours) needing protection beyond the grasp of those greedy corporations, authors, artists, etc.

Well, fine. But the kid in the lede was selling his home-made comics, not giving them away. Should that use be protected? Pirating is okay for the under-aged? That's how gang hits work.

And then he drags in the disabled:

Access to Knowledge (A2K) treaty is a proposal from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to set out the rights and responsibilities of archivists, educators and people who provide access to disabled users of information.

The drafting group - which is open to the general public - includes representatives of creators' groups (tellingly, no one from the corporations that buy creators' works have taken part), disabled rights groups, technical standards bodies, civil rights groups, even medical rights groups like Medecins Sans Frontieres.

Why the disabled get a pass on copyright violation is a mystery.

Has Doctorow taken a position on the WGA strike? It's all about internet use.

Donna Druchunas comments, as possible violations of copyright is a huge issue in the knitting community.