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Life & Times Transcript

1/10/07

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

She pays for the photographs. He doesn't, but he posts them on his blog. Is that stealing?

Brandy Navarre>> If People Magazine want to use our images, they have to pay for them. So why shouldn't someone on a website?

Mario Lavandeira>> I mean, what it really boils down to is that I really don't think what I'm doing is wrong. Call me stupid or call me naīve, but I don't.

Val Zavala>> And then, it's a stately old building with its roots in our military past, but what will the future hold for Los Angeles's Patriotic Hall?

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> You know those celebrity photographs we love to gawk at in magazines and now on websites? Well, you may not realize that, behind those famous faces, a legal battle is brewing over who owns the photographs. The person who took them, the person who paid for them, or the person who posted them. As Hena Cuevas tells us, a showdown is coming in what some people have called the "wild west of the web".

Hena Cuevas>> Joel Ginsberg's job requires a lot of waiting.

Joel Ginsberg>> It's countless hours and a lot of effort and a lot of money and a lot of energy.

Hena Cuevas>> That's because Ginsberg is a celebrity photographer, a member of the much-maligned paparazzi. Today they're on the hunt for a female celebrity shopping at this boutique. A quick call and a fast run down an alley gets him nothing.

Joel Ginsberg>> You could sit here every single day, burn your gasoline up with the price it is, looking for, you know, stories and get nothing. So you can go bankrupt or you could have a very good year.

Hena Cuevas>> When he does get that coveted photograph, he sells to the X17 Photo Agency, the largest in Los Angeles. Brandy Navarre is the owner.

Brandy Navarre>> This is what's interesting to people today, following celebrities' lives whether they're shopping at the grocery story or going to the doctor's office. There is a market for these images, a huge market.

Hena Cuevas>> But she says she's having a problem with the way the images she sells are being used online.

Brandy Navarre>> People, when posting images on their own website, should know who the images have come from and should make sure that they buy their license fee images or have the agreement from the copyright holders to use the images.

Hena Cuevas>> All over the internet, there are thousands of celebrity gossip blogs or personal web logs. They provide photographs with commentary on the comings and goings of singer Brittany Spears or Justin Timberlake, for example. But Navarre says that her photographs are copyrighted and can't be used without permission.

Brandy Navarre>> If you have content that is important, that is the crux of your business and you allow people to steal it, you don't have a business anymore. So we have to protect our content. "I sent an extra email on that one. I sent my usual cease and desist."

Hena Cuevas>> So her company is suing who she calls the biggest offender, PerezHilton.com, the largest of the celebrity gossip blogs. The amount? Seventeen million dollars.

Brandy Navarre>> What's funny is that yesterday we were saying, "I can't believe he hasn't stolen the Brittany yet." You just witnessed a phone call from a photo editor at a magazine saying, "I can't believe he just took those images from you." Now these are images that we would have wanted to sell for a lot of money to that magazine. They're not going to pay as much because they've just seen them on Perez.

Hena Cuevas>> Do you know how the images are being taken?

Brandy Navarre>> That's the million dollar question. We don't know how Perez gets these images exactly.

Hena Cuevas>> PerezHilton.com is run by Mario Lavandeira, or Perez Hilton, as he prefers to be called.

Mario Lavandeira>> If this one particular photo image is really perceiving a problem out there, suing me really isn't going to solve that one problem because there's hundreds, I would venture to say thousands, of gossip blogs out there doing the same thing.

Hena Cuevas>> He says that his blog is just a place where he gives his opinions on his favorite subject: celebrities, many of whom he's had a chance to meet.

Mario Lavandeira>> Anyone could sign up under MySpace and start a blog or anything and, you know, click a few buttons and customize your template and, within five minutes, you're communicating online with the rest of the world. There's something really creative and empowering and inspiring about that.

Hena Cuevas>> Blogs first began as online scrapbooks, places to post thoughts, comments or photographs to share with friends. But Navarre says that something changed along the way.

Brandy Navarre>> Then we kind of slowly started noticing that, wow, there are lots of ads on these sites. This seems to be shifting a little bit. The web logs are no longer just personal diaries. These are money-making machines.

Hena Cuevas>> On the site blogads.com, blogs are listed by category. It shows how many hits they get per week. This way, advertisers can choose where they want to be posted. Hilton is number one in the gossip section with nearly fifteen million hits per week. The ads sell for nine thousand dollars a week.

Mario Lavandeira>> I don't do it for the money. I do it because it's fun, because I get to entertain people, because I get to inform people, and no matter how many try to dismiss what I do, I know that many others, almost four million a day, really enjoy it and that gives what I do meaning.

Brandy Navarre>> If People Magazine want to use our images, they have to pay for them. Why shouldn't people on a website? Even if people.com wants to use our images, they have to pay for them. So why should people.com pay for our images and not PerezHilton.com?

Hena Cuevas>> So what does the law say about copyrighted images on the web?

David Nimmer>> Copyright law is the way that our government protects authors, very broadly defined, and the internet poses a huge problem to copyright law.

Hena Cuevas>> David Nimmer is the author of "Nimmer on Copyright", an eleven-volume treatise. He says that it would be unfair to dismiss the lawsuit as a fight between a celebrity stalker and a gossip columnist.

David Nimmer>> There's plenty of room within copyright law to craft an argument on the average party.

Hena Cuevas>> But he says that the case could affect bloggers who argue that they can use materials under the Rule of Fair Use.

David Nimmer>> Because that is such a broad test, the law is very murky and no one can state for certain which side is going to prevail in this case.

Hena Cuevas>> So is there a way perhaps to control where these images or other copyrighted works might end up on the internet? Well, there are certain software programs that allow users to trace where an image, for example, may have ended up. However, policing like this is expensive and, according to Navarre, very unfair to people like her.

Brandy Navarre>> There needs to be some rules established and people need to understand that the internet is not different legally from, you know, television, magazines, newspapers or any other form of medium. They need to follow the same rules that publishers in any of those other mediums would follow.

Mario Lavandeira>> I mean, what it really boils down to is that I really don't think what I'm doing is wrong. Call me or stupid or call me naīve, but I don't. If I did, then I wouldn't be doing it. It's really that simple.

Hena Cuevas>> Hilton argues that having the photographs on his site actually helps the agency sell them.

Mario Lavandeira>> I know because I know people at the magazines. I know people at television shows. They email me, "Hey, where did you get that picture?" A lot of times, I don't know because where all these bloggers find images. They never credit. They never say, "Oh, this is from this photo agency."

Brandy Navarre>> That still devalues the images in terms of what we're able to charge to the magazines who want those images to appear first in their magazines and not on these websites who are kind of breaking their story.

Hena Cuevas>> Navarre admits that the exposure in the blogs was helpful at first and X17 used to allow the free use of photographs in exchange for a credit and a link back to their site, but not anymore. They now have their own blog and a photo subscription service at a reduced rate. So far, three blogs have signed up.

Brandy Navarre>> We're all just kind of testing the waters of this new medium and trying to navigate through it. That's why we feel that what we're doing is an important step in, you know, establishing the boundaries in this kind of wild west of the internet.

Mario Lavandeira>> I feel confident that a jury of my peers will side with me, but if they don't, I will change my behavior accordingly because I don't want to break the law. I don't think I'm breaking the law. Obviously, they do. I mean, it's as simple as that.

Hena Cuevas>> Both sides are determined to go to court, one battling for the right of ownership, the other for the right to free speech. I'm Hena Cuevas for Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> So what do you think of this "blogisphere" battle? You can let us know. Just go to kcet.org and click on the Life and Times Blog.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> For years, we've been hearing about the six and a half million Californians who live day to day without health insurance. Thousands of them are children. Could this be the year when the governor and the state legislature finally decide to do something about it? At his State of the State Address, Governor Schwarzenegger's recent encounter with the medical system was on clear display.

Arnold Schwarzenegger>> "When I first came here in 1968, one of the first things that I did was ask people where I could get health insurance because I knew that, as an athlete, injuries happen, as I found out very recently (laughter). Here's the ironic thing about health care today. California's medical knowledge, its medical technology, is as strong and as vibrant as a bodybuilder. Yet our health care system itself is a sick old man."

Val Zavala>> He talked about infrastructure, education, prisons and health care, in particular, a critical problem that has been growing for the past decade, the number of Californians with no health insurance. It's now at more than six million.

Arnold Schwarzenegger>> "Recently I visited California Hospital Medical Center in downtown Los Angeles and they're doing a terrific job there, fantastic. But last year, the uninsured people who came to the emergency room left behind sixty million dollars in unpaid bills.

Now this is just one hospital. Multiply that by the number of hospitals that we have in California and it amounts to billions and billions of dollars. Guess who pays for all of this? It's you, you, you, all of us who are lucky enough to have coverage. That's who pays."

Val Zavala>> The governor's proposal announced a day earlier has been called sweeping and bold, asking all parties, doctors, insurance companies, hospitals, employers, attorneys and individuals, to pitch in. For a better understanding of the governor's plan, I went to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and talked to its founder and director, Richard Brown.

Richard Brown>> I think the governor presented a great challenge to California. He has presented a very bold proposal that, if we adopt it and implement it effectively, would move California to the head of all other states.

Val Zavala>> Among the governor's key proposals, that all Californians have health care coverage and that the state subsidize health care policies for low-income families, meaning that families of three who earn about forty-one thousand dollars a year or less would get assistance. But Brown is concerned about middle-class households earning just over that amount.

Richard Brown>> For middle-class families, it kind of leaves too many of them at the mercy of either their employer providing comprehensive coverage at their will, or the insurance marketplace providing affordable options. A family making fifty thousand dollars a year thinking about having to spend ten thousand of it on health care -- and that's just the covered health care -- that's a very good chunk of their resources and that's not affordable and it would drive a lot of people over the cliff.

Val Zavala>> The governor is also proposing that employers with ten or more employees must offer their workers health care coverage, one way or another.

Richard Brown>> Employers under the governor's proposal who have ten or more employees would have to either provide coverage to their employees or pay into a trust fund as what he calls an in-lieu fee. That in-lieu fee would represent four percent of payroll for that employer. That's a good beginning, but I think it's actually not enough.

Employers who are currently provided coverage, which is the majority of employers, are spending quite a bit more than that and it seems reasonable to ask employers who aren't spending anything today to spend something, a little more, keeping it affordable to them, but at the same time, making a more significant contribution to buy affordable comprehensive coverage which they need.

Val Zavala>> Perhaps the most controversial proposal is to insure all children, regardless of their immigration status. That's sure to meet resistance from Republican members of the state legislature. But Brown says that it's the most cost effective proposal and already ninety percent of California kids are covered.

Richard Brown>> But the frustration is that ten percent of our children have no coverage and these are the children who are the future workers of California, the future citizens and residents of California, and we really need to assure that they have what they need to be healthy and productive adults.

It seems a no-brainer, frankly, to invest our dollars in making sure that those children are healthy and that they have the medical care they need to identify chronic illnesses like asthma and other kinds of limitations that might make them less able to learn, less able to become productive adults, and help to correct those things now.

Val Zavala>> But should children who are here illegally also get health care?

Richard Brown>> Those children are in our schools. The courts have ruled that they have a right to an education when they're here, regardless of how they came. Federal law requires that, if those children have asthma and they have an asthma attack in the middle of the night or if they have a severe ear infection and they're screaming in pain and their parents take them to a hospital emergency room, they get treated regardless of their immigration status and regardless of their ability to pay or their insurance coverage.

Why don't we deal with those things in a more effective way and in a more cost effective way by giving them coverage, giving them a medical home and offer the kind of medical care that we all expect our children to be able to get? They are the least expensive group to try to cover.

Overwhelmingly, these are healthy children, but they do have the normal problems of any of our children in getting sick and needing medical care, having certain kinds of conditions that, if we intervene early, we can manage those conditions and prevent them from becoming learning disabilities in addition to being expensive health-wise.

We are very close to being able to claim in California universal coverage and we ought to take that step and make it a reality for all of California's children. It is the lowest hanging fruit and it is something that ought to grab this year and make sure we enact and implement as effectively as we can.

Val Zavala>> The governor is also proposing that doctors contribute two percent of their gross earnings to help the state expand its coverage, and it would prohibit insurance companies from denying policies to people who need individual coverage.

Richard Brown>> Insurers in California are in a position where they can simply turn people down because of the job they work at or because they have the most minor of health conditions and are simply taking some medications to help manage that condition. Those people can't get health insurance and, when they can get it, it may be very expensive. The governor's proposal, I think, very appropriately would reform that individual insurance marketplace.

Val Zavala>> So what are chances of the legislature passing Schwarzenegger's health plan?

Arnold Schwarzenegger>> "In the past, health care reform was always dead on arrival. This year, I can feel something different in the air. I can feel the energy, the momentum, the desire for action. Ladies and gentlemen, we will get it down."

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
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Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> Did you ever notice that tall building near downtown just south of the 10 Freeway called Patriotic Hall? Ever wonder what's inside that place? Well, believe it or not, eighty years of history, documents and memorabilia, and a possible renovation means that it might be time to get it sorted out. Vicki Curry did some excavating with the help of former Marine, Jay Morales.

Jay Morales>> Here it is right here. "Los Angeles Times, February 22, 1926. Supervisors Give Great Memorial to War Heroes".

Vicki Curry>> Soldiers from the Civil War to the Iraq War have walked through its doors. For more than eighty years, Bob Hope Patriotic Hall has been a home away from home for Los Angeles's veterans, a center where they can find services and camaraderie.

Jay Morales>> Today this is the last remaining active duty building built by World War I veterans on land deeded by Civil War veterans. In the whole entire United States, there was no building this old, this well-preserved and with this much history attached to it.

Vicki Curry>> Jay Morales is working hard to keep that history alive. He's a Vietnam vet with Post 8 of the American Legion, which has had an office on the eighth floor since the building opened.

Jay Morales>> If you were just walking in at that time, every floor had a story to tell. Every floor had a history to it. It was just amazing.

Vicki Curry>> Now the County Supervisors are taking it away, at least temporarily. The hall is shutting down operations while experts study what it would take to restore the building.

Jay Morales>> You have an eighty-five-plus year old building. The wiring is obsolete. The plumbing definitely is obsolete.

Vicki Curry>> In getting ready for the move, the vets have uncovered some long-lost treasures. Morales and a few other volunteers have spent months sorting through countless documents that have been stored away for decades. So each year had a book like that?

Jay Morales>> Each year has a book like this, an historian's records. It shows what is happening in Los Angeles as far as the American Legion was concerned and what they did for that particular year.

Vicki Curry>> Seven presidents have visited Patriotic Hall, along with numerous military heroes and foreign dignitaries.

Jay Morales>> President Herbert Hoover came to Los Angeles and was hosted by the veterans in this building. President Wilson, who was the founder, was here and actually was the man who signed the Charter for the American Legion when he was president. This is Douglas McArthur, by the way, "With affectionate greetings to my comrades in arms at Los Angeles Post 8" from McArthur.

This is a very priceless picture, I'm told, of a young Winston Churchill taken in 1921 when he was Vice Lord of the Admiralty. We also have the accompanying letter that he sent us in 1921. We have a complete collection of the French general staff, the English general staff, as well as all the Americans.

Vicki Curry>> The ten-floor building also holds flags, helmets, weapons, medals, artifacts soldiers have brought back from the battlefields.

Jay Morales>> You know, we read about it in the history books and here it is, the original stuff. You know, real German guns from World War I and real battle flags. General Patton gave us his military uniform with all his medals. Every meeting room in this building had some historical memorabilia on its walls dedicated for that room. The general himself, Omar Bradley, one of the last living five-star generals, cut the ribbon to dedicate that room.

Vicki Curry>> But over the last few decades, much of the memorabilia was taken off the walls and put into storage. Los Angeles County started renting out the rooms for parties and meetings. A Korean church moved into the auditorium. And as far as Jay Morales is concerned, all that activity wasn't good for Patriotic Hall.

Jay Morales>> A lot of the damage, the graffiti, some of the wear and tear occurred within the last five or ten years because of that.

Vicki Curry>> He's even more concerned about the damage to their collections. After years of improper storage, some items are in bad shape or missing. But now that they're out again, he's hopeful for the future.

Jay Morales>> The heart of our collection which is extremely valuable is still here and now we're putting it back together. We've been told by professionals and experts in the field that some of it, of course, is priceless and it's one of a kind. We don't just have an historical collection. We have a world-class historical collection.

Vicki Curry>> The county is hiring experts to catalog and store the collection. Morales would like to see it professionally displayed and available for education.

Jay Morales>> I am a graduate of a school that's located just four blocks down the street here called St. Vincent's. I remember coming here for history classes and being totally awed by this place. I mean, just totally impressed. Back then, you definitely knew you were in some special place.

Things like this, this kind of historical documents, historical photographs and handwritten letters and articles, they don't exist anymore, you know, because not everybody kept it and we did. We kept the originals and now we have it all as part of our history. That stuff is irreplaceable. You're not going to find that everywhere.

Vicki Curry>> First, Patriotic Hall needs to be restored.

Jay Morales>> But the building was built rock-solid. They built it with thirty-seven inch thick walls and, the ground, they put sold pieces of rock down there on the foundation. The marble that we have here that was quarried up here in the San Gabriels and the imported wood, everything was first-class.

The original funds that were raised by the veterans in 1921 to build the building was over eight hundred thousand. By the time they were finished, the building cost them a million dollars. Here is the way that the auditorium looked when it was brand new. These pictures were taken the month that the building opened.

Vicki Curry>> Since then, thousands have been inside the building and millions more have seen it in the movies. It's appeared in more than three hundred films. The auditorium was used for the opening speech in "Patton".

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> The stairwell was in "Vertigo".

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> And the big audition scene in "Flashdance" was shot in the Nimitz Room.

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> But all along, it still serves the veterans. There was an attempt in 1984 to demolish the hall to make way for a parking structure, but Morales led the fight to save it. He found out that the deed to the land specified that it be used for a veterans' facility in perpetuity unless the veterans themselves choose to vacate it. So before making this move, Post 8 put it in writing that they're not vacating, just temporarily relocating.

Jay Morales>> There are some people, however, who felt that this building could serve a better purpose or another purpose and we needed to remind them that there was only one purpose for this building. It sounds cliché to say it, but our freedom isn't free. It has to be paid for by people willing to put their necks on the line.

Well, this is their legacy. This is their cathedral. This is their home. This is what we're about and the county of Los Angeles should be proud to have this. I think they are and I think they recognize that and I think they're doing something about it.

Val Zavala>> And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Sponsored in part by:


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