Outfoxed Rope-a-Dope Begins?

On Sunday the New York Times Magazine published an extensive article on a new documentary that is sharply critical of Fox News and borrows extensively from copyrighted Fox News clips under the fair use doctrine (How to Make a Guerrilla Documentary). My take here: Guerrilla Documentary Copyfighting. Donna Wentworth's here: Fair Use It or Lose It, Part II. Seth Finkelstein's here: "OutFoxed" and Fair-Use Strategy. Larry Lessig, who is working on the documentary's legal defense comments here: outfoxed.

Frankly, I thought it would be foolish for Fox News to take legal action against this film. All they will do is give it more publicity and make it more popular and more viewed than ever before. Without the major publicity that a lawsuit will bring, very few outside those already convinced Fox is biased would see the film. Guess Fox News is more foolish than I thought. Looks like they may be considering a little legal rope-a-dope.

According to the always-on-top-of-things Broadcasting & Cable, Fox News has released a statement on the film (Fox News Bites Back):

It’s illegal copyright infringement facilitated by The New York Times and billionaire liberal George Soros. Or so says Fox News Channel in counterattacking new documentary Outfoxed, which slams the cable network for the slant of its programming and blames its financial success for the "Foxification" of other news outlets.

In a statement handed out at the press conference by an unidentified woman, Fox News declared, "The illegal copyright infringement actions of moveon.org in cooperation with The New York Times, including 'cutting a deal' not to give Fox News Channel adequate time to react, is unprecedented." The Times, it said, in "taking orders from" a George Soros-funded Web site, "corrupts the journalistic process. This is the real story." It described Soros as "a left-wing billionaire currency speculator who funds many liberal efforts."