Yoko Ono and EMI dropped their lawsuit against Ben Stein and the makers of the intelligent design film, Expelled, for using “Imagine” by John Lennon without permission. Ono had failed in getting the music taken out of the film back in June, but she pressed on with a copyright infringement lawsuit.
Ono and EMI dropped the suit after it became clear that Expelled’s use of “Imagine” fell under the fair-use doctrine, and they couldn’t get a judge to side with them. However, “Imagine” won’t appear in the DVD version of the film because the filmmakers were ordered not to put the song on a DVD version until the cases were resolved. And since they wanted to get the DVD out as quickly as possible to dupe the people who saw the movie into buying the DVD before they realized how terrible it was, they pressed the DVD without the song on it. [Reuters]
