About the “Expelled” Animation

About the “Expelled” Animation

In case you missed the flap over the animation of cellular processes in the upcoming movie Expelled, here’s the nutshell version:

People at prerelease screenings said they saw footage from XVIVO/Harvard’s The Inner Life of the Cell. Bits of very similar animation appear in promotional clips for the movie such as this one. There’s a post at antievolution.org that shows stills from both films, side by side.

Now XVIVO, the makers of the original animation, are suing the makers of Expelled for copyright infringement.

My IANAL thoughts below the fold.

Judging mainly by comments at Pharyngula and Uncommon Descent, everyone agrees that the animation in Expelled bears a striking resemblance to The Inner Life of the Cell, enough so that a random viewer is likely to think they’re the same. But everyone agrees that they’re not the same, as the side-by-side comparison of stills shows. It’s also not controversial to say that XVIVO raised the bar for medical and biological animation, and that future animators will try to live up to this new standard. So does XVIVO have a case, or would a reasonable court throw it out?

Damned if I know. I’m not a lawyer. But I can offer some thoughts.

To begin with, you can’t copyright nature, though you can copyright specific representations of nature. For instance, I can’t copyright the shape of Mount Rainier, but I have a copyright on this photograph of it. If you use my photo without permission, I can sue you. If you go to Washington and take a picture from the same point as I did, you can use your photo in any way that you like.

Likewise, XVIVO can’t copyright things like the shape of ATP or the RNA transcription process: those are part of nature. However, what they did was much more complex than my photo of Mt. Rainier: they created a representation of natural processes, but made thousands of artistic decisions as to how to portray them along the way.

For starters, there’s the fact that the cell is filled with thousands or millions of molecules of all types. Leaving them all in would have resulted in a confusing mess that obscured the processes they were trying to show. So most of the clutter in the cell was removed (note that the cells in TILotC don’t have any water. And the vein seen at the beginning is oddly lacking in, well, blood).

In some sequences, molecules look as though they’re being pushed around by invisible assistants. In others (such as the famous scene showing the movement of kinesin along a microtubule), a lot of extraneous motion has been removed, so that motion appears fluid rather than jittery and stochastic. The Expelled people copied all of this “look and feel”, removing pretty much the same noise and highlighting most of the same molecules and processes.

So does this constitute copyright infringement? Well, that depends where you draw the line. If someone writes a book describing some biological process, and I simply copy some portion of his text, that’s plagiarism. If I copy the text and replace every fifth word with a synonym so that my copy doesn’t show up in Google, that’s still plagiarism. What if, instead of individual words, I take a chapter from the original book and paraphrase each paragraph in turn? I think that still counts as plagiarism.

And I think this is what the Expelled crew have done: they’ve produced an animation that intentionally copies a lot of the features of the XVIVO one. It seems clear that they’re attempting to profit from Harvard/XVIVO’s research and effort without due compensation.

Over at Uncommon Descent, Bill Dembski shares a letter he claims is from the producers of Expelled. It ends with a list of URLs showing different representations of kinesin, in order to show the kind of information available for free on the Internet. But in doing so, I think they dig themselves into a deeper hole: these other sites depict kinesin in many different ways, so it’s obvious that there are many ways to represent it. Yet they chose a representation that looks almost exactly like the XVIVO one.

I remember a computer science professor talking about how people are often surprised at how easy it is to recognize when a student has copied someone else’s code. The reasoning is that if two students have to solve the exact same problem, then of course their code is going to look almost the same, even if they work completely independently. But in reality, writing a piece of code, or designing a suspension bridge, or drawing up plans for a four-bedroom house involves an awful lot of individual decisions, from the weighty to the trivial: should I go for an easy-to-maintain O(N²) algorithm, or is it worth the trouble of implementing an O(N log N) one? Should I use a loop here, or tail-recursion? Should I call my counter variable i or count?

In this case, both XVIVO and the Expelled animators tried to solve the problem of depicting molecular processes inside a cell. But it doesn’t look as though the Expelled folks came up with their solution independently.