In other entertainment law news…
—Taryn Manning, who plays Pennsatucky on Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, has sued Caroline Dimech (who sometimes goes by Cline Mayo) and Dimech’s company Fierce Flix claiming Dimech stole her idea for a movie and then tried to oust her from the project.
In a complaint filed Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court (read it here), Manning claims she brought the idea for a film called Droppers to Dimech in 2007. They together shot a trailer allegedly funded by and starring Manning, but Manning claims by 2015, Dimech “insisted that Plaintiff not only played no creative role in ‘Droppers,’ but that Plaintiff somehow infringed upon a copyright allegedly belonging to [Dimech] and her company.” Manning wants the court to declare she didn’t infringe on Dimech’s copyrights and Dimech doesn’t have interest in Droppers sufficient for infringement. She’s represented by Freedman & Taitelman’s Bryan Freedman.
—Netflix has won an appeal in California’s 9th Circuit in a case over whether its sharing of users’ viewing records violates the Video Privacy Protection Act. But unlike some VPPA cases, in which plaintiffs have sued defendants including Hulu, Viacom and Google on claims the video outlets share consumer data with advertisers and social networks, Meghan Mollett and Tracey Hellwig took issue with the way their friends, family and guests could view their queues and recently watched videos when signed into Mollett or Hellwig’s accounts or watching over their shoulders. In agreement with the district court’s granting Netflix’s motion to dismiss, the appellate court found the VPPA’s permission of disclosing “personally identifiable information concerning any consumer… to the consumer” applicable to the multiple “consumers” on Hellwig or Mollett’s account. Read the ruling. THR has requested comment from the plaintiffs’ lawyers.
