And, oh yeah, what a great song “Creep” remains. Sure, it would have been cooler had Prince covered “Karma Police” or “Everything In Its Right Place,” (especially if Prince had changed the opening line to “Yesterday I woke up, you were sucking my lemon”), but, all things considered, “Creep” was good enough, and the whole thing just becomes part of the legend of both artists.

You’d think. But, as it turns out, things are a bit more complicated. Which since it’s Prince and Radiohead, makes a lot of sense, since inherent in the greatness of each artist is more than a touch of madness.

So here’s what happened: Prince, his royal paranoidness, instantly had YouTube take the videos down, claiming copyright violation.

But Thom Yorke of Radiohead, gods bless his not-exactly-sane soul, had a different reaction:

In a recent interview, Thom Yorke said he heard about Prince’s performance from a text message and thought it was “hilarious.” Yorke laughed when his bandmate, guitarist Ed O’Brien, said the blocking had prevented him from seeing Prince’s version of their song.

“Really? He’s blocked it?” asked Yorke, who figured it was their song to block or not. “Surely we should block it. Hang on a moment.”

Yorke added: “Well, tell him to unblock it. It’s our … song.”

One one level, Prince obviously gets it: he is savvy enough to be way ahead of the curve when it came to using the internet to distribute his music, and he’s also no stranger to the free distribution model either, having given away his (actually pretty good to my like-and-respect-him-more-than-love-him ears) Planet Earth album in a Brit newspaper in order to goose a tour.

So he’s no stranger to all of the smart ways to use the digital world to get his music out there. And yet, he somehow finds damage in fan-posted videos on YouTube.

It’s obviously all about c-o-n control with Prince, which is why he’s done all of that batshit crazy stuff like change his name to that symbol and scrawl “slave” on his face. In his mind, it’s very black-and-white: either he controls it, or he doesn’t. The problem is that this is one of those situations where a smarter worldview might not be black-and-white, but rather a shade of, er, purple.

Yes, YouTube will make advertising money from his image on their site, and no, they aren’t likely to share any of that revenue with him, so — and I’m totally guessing here — he probably has the right, despite the fact that it isn’t his song. Because it is his performance.

But just because he has the right doesn’t mean that he is right. The people who posted the videos aren’t evil soulless corporations in league with YouTube to take down Prince’s music empire. They’re just fans using YouTube as a distribution mechanism to let other fans see what they thought was a cool little bit of music history.

And in this case, “other fans” include one of the guys who wrote the song!

So this is what I think that Radiohead should do, if Prince ignores them (which he probably will): self-released Prince cover versions. For their current tour, they should learn “When U Were Mine,” or “P Control” or, especially “The Cross,” which has been ripe for a great cover for nearly two decades.

Actually, I’m really not sure exactly how this gets Prince back for having the video taken down, but ever since I heard about Prince covering “Creep,” I’ve thought that it would be cool if Radiohead took a page from the Nick Lowe (who released an EP called Bowi after David Bowie released Low) playbook and cover “The Cross” as a response.

Now, if we could just get Prince down from the one he’s on . . .

• Radiohead to Prince: Unblock ‘Creep’ cover videos

The schedule for the next few months is posted on flyers outside the theater, and on December 15, we’re doing It’s a Wonderful Life. There was already some internal conflict about it, and some anonymous wag wrote on one of the flyers: “It’s not a bad movie, you S.O.B.s!!!” With three lines under S.O.B.s, so we’ll know they mean business.

Yeah, some people don’t like Bad Movie Night so much.

Me, I do. It’s my baby. I didn’t create the show—that honor goes to Jim Fourniadis and Ty McKenzie—but I was there on the first night: Red Dawn, March 27, 2005. Coincidentally, I broke up with my girlfriend of seven years earlier that afternoon. As a result I almost didn’t go to the show at all, but I was looking forward to it, and the point of the breakup had been (among other things) so I could go do the stuff I wanted, and Bad Movie Night was very much the stuff I wanted to do. I became a frequent co-host, eventually weaseling working my up to de facto curator. It’s still the most fun thing I do on a regular basis.

Held every Sunday night at 8pm at the Dark Room (2263 Mission between 18th and 19th in San Francisco), Bad Movie Night is easily described as Mystery Science Theater 3000 live: we heckle a movie. Three hosts sit in the front row with microphones, and the audience is invited to participate as well, to hoot and holler and shout their own comments. I’m the primary host on the first, third and occasionally fifth Sundays, introducing the movie and working one of the mics, and Jim handles the second and fourth.

The great personal irony is that I fracking hate loud audiences at movies. Cannot stand ‘em. If one other person is in the auditorium, it ruins my night. It partially accounts for why I go to maybe a half-dozen mainstream movies over the course of a given year, and even then I try to wait until I’m fairly confident the crowd has thinned out. Vash and I waited until after The Simpsons Movie had dropped out of the Top 10, and we went on a Sunday morning, when we figured that most people would be going to see the newer, shinier movies. There were all of two other people in the theater, and they did exactly what I hate having to deal with when I’ve paid ten bucks for a ticket: they repeated dialogue in a dull monotone (“you can’t kill him if he’s wearing people clothes”) and commented on the action (usually thrilling recaps along the line of “He got hit on the head.”). At least the IMAX 3D showing of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, also on a Sunday morning after the show had dropped out of the Top 10, was in a theater large enough for me to pretend that the few other patrons didn’t exist.

And, in fairness, that isn’t just the case with mainstream movies: I no longer see Alfred Hitchcock movies—or just about any American movie made before 1993—at the Castro Theater. Which is a damned shame, because the Castro is a gorgeous old-school movie palace built in 1922, with a gigantic screen and beautiful architecture and a guy playing a Wurlitzer before most shows. It’s quite possibly the most ideal environment for watching a movie, especially a classic movie which was intended to be shown in such an ornate setting. Problem is, the rest of the audience goes to these old movies to laugh at the old hairstyles and clothes and gender roles and how everybody smokes and drinks all the time, and by god they do not shut up. After the second time I saw Vertigo there and the audience giggled through the part where…oh, hell, though every part, I’d had enough. The rooftop chase which opens the movie was treated like it was the funniest thing since the mirror scene in Duck Soup.

For Bad Movie Night, though? The rowdier the crowd, the better. Context is everything.

Two of our best nights in terms of audience participation were Snakes on a Plane and the Medialoper favorite Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Okay, yeah, Snakes on a Plane was a gimme, but Sgt. Pepper? Who would have guessed? Packed house, and they had a blast. We encourage brown-bagging, and a good half of them were thoroughly drunk by the time of the “ahhh-ahhhhhhh-ahhhhh” singalong in “A Day in the Life.” When they chanted “Jump! Jump! Jump!” at the climax of the song (as Peter Frampton’s character tries to commit suicide before being saved by Billy Preston and his magical gold-lame suit), it was one of the proudest moments of my life. I tend to think of myself of as a writer first and a performer second, but it arguably all falls under the subtext of entertainer—whether someone is reading my writing or listening to me read it aloud or I’m acting in a play or hosting a show or even if they’re enjoying someone else that I’ve introduced, the last thing I want is for them to be bored, and little makes me happier than people having fun on my watch. Pleasure is too damned fleeting, and I like facilitating it.

Since Mystery Science Theater 3000 is one of my favorite teevee shows, getting to do Bad Movie Night involves no small amount of wish fulfillment. I try to work in as many running gags from MST3K as I can, even if most of the time the audience doesn’t know it’s a reference. During mundane actions, for example: “Nobody will be admitted during the thrilling parking scene!” Okay, so it loses something in the transition, kinda like the jokes on the covers of Rhino VHS editions of the series (a design motif they wisely abandoned for the DVD editions). It helps if you imagine it in a Tom Servo voice, I suppose.

We’ve developed our own share of recurring jokes in the two years and change that the show’s been running. There’s the obscure “Skull Films!”, born when we watched an episode of Quincy as part of Bob Crane Double Feature Night, or “Boing…boing….boing,” which harkens back to the endless credit sequence of Tanya Roberts riding horseback in Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. (I’ll let you do the math on that one.) For no reason whatsoever, Jim Fourniadis saying “la pelicula es rojo” cracks me up every freakin’ time. Existing lines like “Dick Laurant is dead” from Lost Highway and “I wish I could quit you!” from Brokeback Mountain are also popular.

Early on, I suggested movies which MST3K would have done if they could have. One of our first features was Starship Invasions, referenced in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide as a possibility for the seventh season, though they were never able to get the rights. It was also obvious that they wanted to do Road House so bad they could taste it, and while it wasn’t an option on their budget (which was limited to movies in the Comedy Central or Sci-Fi Channel libraries), it is on ours. We fear no copyright.

(Of course, we respect and admire and fully support copyright and think it’s swell and wouldn’t want to steal food from the artists’ mouths by showing movies we don’t own the rights to, because that would be wrong, and I certainly don’t mean to imply that we charge people five dollars a head to watch Little Man without the Wayans clan being properly compensated. And, in fact, that’s not what they’re paying five bucks for at all. They’re paying five bucks for the popcorn, or to hear Jim play the banjo on the nights that he’s hosting, or to watch whatever the dancing monkey act is that I do on my nights. That we happen to project a movie is just one of those things done for…um…texture. Yeah, texture. Are you going to tell me there’s a copyright on texture? What kind of fascist dictatorship is this? Smash the state!)

For as much fun as doing the show itself is, sometimes making the schedule is just as fulfilling, especially lacking the constraints that MST3K faced. Mike Nelson’s gotten around those issues nicely with his Rifftrax series, and not coincidentally, one of his first movies was Road House. I had the good fortune to see Rifftrax Live earlier this year, featuring Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett riffing on the Sylvester Stallone arm-wrestling epic Over the Top. It was like going to church. Nah, that analogy’s no good, since I hated going to church as a kid. It was like seeing God. I’m an atheist, but still, it fits.

I’m mostly left up to my own devices when making the schedule, though Jim often gives me suggestions; this Sunday’s feature, Electric Dreams, was his idea, as well as Elvis month in February. My criteria for choosing movies tends to be based on how well-known they are, how much they cost, how recently they were made, and whether or not I can shoehorn them into a theme.

Like, this month’s theme is “Vaporware Cinema: The Way Computers Never Were.” We started off with Hackers, and the last two movies of the month will be WarGames and The Net. None of these were made after 1997 nor were all that expensive, but Hackers drew a large crowd (aided by the presence of geek icons Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders as my guest co-hosts), and WarGames is getting terrific buzz. Say what you will about the Boomers, but my fellow Gen-X’ers are no less nostalgic for our youth, and I’m more than happy to exploit that.

But, really, what I like doing most are recent, big-budget movies. Why? Because they’re recent, big-budget movies. That’s enough of a crime. They’re product, they’re commerce, and they’re inescapable. Millions of dollars are wasted on making them and even more are wasted on promoting them. I find that offensive. I don’t watch commercial teevee or listen to commercial radio, and yet when I went to work every morning this past Summer I couldn’t not be aware of Transformers or Spider-Man 3 or Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End because of the ads plastered everywhere. (All three of those movies are being covered in January for “Summer Megabudget Movies” month, along with our annual kick-off showing of Snakes on a Plane.) I highly resent being unable to go about my daily life without having these fracking gazillion-dollar videogames shoved down my throat. (Don’t even get me started on the posters for Mr. Woodcock which recently blanketed San Francisco. Just…don’t. And, Susan? The crush is over. Seriously. You lost me with this one.) So the only possible recourse is to ridicule them at Bad Movie Night.

Of course, I suppose I could just not watch them at all, not do them at Bad Movie Night, but…naah. That’s crazy talk.

Occasionally people will suggest cult movies like Repo Man or Forbidden Zone. To me, that’s missing the point. I have a lot more respect for a weird, low-budget movie that at least tries to be different and original than a big Hollywood blockbuster. And sometimes there are movies that I don’t want us to do; Velvet Goldmine recently found its way onto the schedule despite my objections, and the second movie we did was Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls, a film which in spite of its nonexistent budget achieves everything it set to out to do and which I admire a great deal.

The thing is, we’re doing the movies in question no harm whatsoever. I know that. One night of being mocked at an obscure black-box theater with a seating capacity of forty-nine is not exactly going to topple Michael Bay’s empire, nor cause irreparable damage the art of cinema. Hamlet survived being done during the final season of MST3K, after all, so Lady in the Water is fair game.

Some people got persnickety about us doing that movie, calling it “personal” and “misunderstood.” Yeah, right. Lady in the Water cost seventy-five million dollars. Frack it.

Believe it or not, I love movies. I consider myself a film buff, a film geek, and I even have an otherwise useless piece of paper in a box somewhere which proves I receieved a Bachelors Degree in Cinema from San Francisco State University, 1997. Among the reasons I chose to major in Cinema was that I knew it would hold my interest and that I’d be able to complete the damn degree, because I like reading and writing and thinking about movies. In recent years I’ve read The Man Who Heard Voices (the book about the making of Lady in the Water) without having seen the movie, as I also did with with Final Cut (about the making of Heaven’s Gate), The Devil’s Candy (detailing the production of the The Bonfire of the Vanities, which as far as I’m concerned was doomed when an executive declared Melanie Griffith to be sexier than Uma Thurman), and so on.

I even keep up with movie news. I like to know who’s doing what. When I see a movie poster I always read the credits, to see whose contract specified their name had to be in a box or how many people produced the latest Robin Williams comedy. (License to Wed clocked in with four executive producers, four people simply listed as producer, two co-producers, and one line producer. I’ll bet it was the best-produed movie ever!) That stuff’s like porn to me. I read an interesting article today about the pre-production of the upcoming Disney movie Enchanted. It looks horrible, and I have no intention of seeing it outside of the Bad Movie Night context, but I enjoyed reading about it. Whenever someone says wow, you must have seen every movie ever made! because of my rather vast repository of useless cinema knowledge, I tell them the truth: no, I haven’t seen every movie made nor would I want to, but I’d love to read about them.

What’s lasted with me the most from film school was the concept that, like any other art form, movies are a reflection of the time they were made. Even if it’s a period piece, it still reflects the values and mores of the contemporary filmmakers. (This is among the reasons why I don’t think remakes are a bad thing, but that’s another discussion entirely.) Nicholas Meyer explains this brilliantly in his commentary on the Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan DVD, defending Merritt Buttrick’s preppy sweater-around-the-neck look.

But it’s why I like to do recent big-budget movies, beyond the practical reality that we get a lower turnout for old movies nobody’s heard of: they’re a mirror to our current society. I like to spit in that mirror, to say “Frack you” for making it impossible to live in this country without constantly being marketed to. Yeah, I’d know about these movies anyway because I make the conscious choice to read about them, but that’s a choice. Bad Movie Night, among other things, is my way of taking back just a little bit of that power.

It’s nowhere near as lofty as culture jamming, nor as visible as spoofs on Saturday Night Live or Mad Magazine (they still do movie spoofs, right?), but it’s a great way to spend a Sunday evening.

Some of our detractors, our loyal opposition, say they don’t condone Bad Movie Night because they love movies. To which I say: what’s your point? I don’t doubt that those people love movies (not to mention take pride in their hallowed, self-appointed positions as defenders of cinema), but as I established before, the fact I do Bad Movie Night doesn’t mean I hate movies. If I hated movies, I wouldn’t devote so much time and energy to it, writing up blurbs and resizing graphics and all the other little things I do for the show every week, let alone having to actually watch the movies. Allow me to explain—

You know what I hate? Babies and children. Seriously. With all due respect to my readers who have reproduced (because your kids are the exception, of course), I cannot stand those tiny hellspawn. More than once I’ve asked to be seated at a restaurant as far away as I can from people with babies, and as I write this at Borders I’m occasionally hissing at the couple who snagged the table near the power outlet before I could get there. Do they need that particular table? Did they plug in a laptop or even a cell phone? No, and I almost wouldn’t mind except that they also have a baby in a stroller, which means everything they do is intended to piss me off.

I cannot begin to describe the level of stress I’ve felt since a family with a one year-old and a five year-old moved in upstairs last December. My home used to be a place of solace. No more, because of the constant running and screaming and crying and thumping, from seven in the morning onwards. Every day I hope that my landlord will tell me those people have decided to move away. Actually, that’s not true; I’ve abandoned hope, since it was killing me. Now I’ve realized that I have to either learn to accept it, or be chased away from the apartment which has been my home since 1995.

All of which is to demonstrate the originally stated point: I hate kids. And yet, I don’t do a show involving kids, do I? No. Because I don’t like them, and I don’t want to be around things I don’t like. I had to keep reminding myself watching Children of Men (and especially reading the book) that mass infertility would be a bad thing.

I do love movies, though. I hate the theatrical moviegoing experience, I hate the advertising, I hated that in practically every frame of the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre the pretty, pretty people were bathed in golden light like a fracking Gap ad. But I love movies. I get a great deal of pleasure out of Bad Movie Night, and for many movies that’s the only way I’ll ever see them. I otherwise would never sit down and watch Transformers or Basic Instinct 2 or especially The Passion of the Christ. Whooboy, that one ruffled some feathers, lemme tell ya. The turnout was low and a lot of regulars gave me static about for weeks before and afterward, but I consider it one of our best nights. No movie has deserved it more.

In the end, you only bust the chops of those you love. It’s like a Friars Roast, and again, when it’s all over the movie is unharmed. (Unlike kids would be if I had to work with them every week.)

Lofty ideals of spitting in metaphorical mirrors aside, it’s just a good time. Movies are entertainment by definition, whether it’s Friday the 13th Part III: 3-D or Shoah, and Bad Movie Night takes the passive element out of them. The audience is the real show.

One member of our loyal opposition described Bad Movie Night as “making us all that much more stupid.”

Man, if that isn’t the perfect mission statement, I don’t know what is.

“This copyrighted telecast is presented by authority of the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball. It may not be reproduced or retransmitted in any form, and the accounts and descriptions of this game may not be disseminated without express written consent.”

Read the warning closely and it’s not clear what is allowed. MLB doesn’t want me uploading video clips to YouTube — fair enough. But what about “accounts and descriptions” of the game? Do I really need the express written consent of Bud Selig in order to legally tell you that Barry Bonds walked on four pitches in the fifth inning?

On one hand, MLB’s warning is so broad and all-inclusive that it’s become something of a cultural joke. On the other hand, similar over-reaching warnings have become standard on most forms of content protected by copyright. Copyright holders may not actually have all of the rights they claim when they issue these warnings, but that doesn’t stop them from trying to scare consumers with unenforceable threats.

The cumulative impact of these warnings has been to confuse consumers about the nature and balance of rights associated with copyright. Copyright law is complicated enough without entertainment companies intentionally misleading the public.

So, how do sports leagues and entertainment companies get away with these warnings? Mostly because no one has ever bothered to question their validity. Until now.

Yesterday the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission alleging that the warnings many copyright holders give to consumers are essentially a form of “unfair and deceptive trade”.

From the complaint:

The claim that news accounts or “descriptions” of the game cannot be “disseminated” is manifestly false. No author may copyright facts or ideas. Copyright serves to promote the dissemination of information by ensuring that every idea, theory, and fact in a copyrighted work becomes instantly available for public exploitation at the moment of publication. Yet the leagues purport to prohibit every unauthorized post-game water-cooler conversation, notwithstanding that a sports league is constitutionally barred from obtaining any copyright over the facts of the games that it produces.

In other words, MLB doesn’t have all of the rights they claim they do.

The complaint goes on to note examples of similar warnings on DVDs, in print publications, and in other forms of media. In all cases, the warnings misrepresent federal law in ways that intentionally mislead consumers.

Collectively, the entertainment industry has an almost pathological aversion to the concept of fair use. A good portion of the War on Piracy ™ is actually an extension of the entertainment industry’s propaganda war against fair use and consumer rights. Somewhere in Hollywood a bean counter has a spreadsheet with a formula that reads ‘[copyright] – [fair use] = [more sales]‘.

The public has been subjected to these warning messages for so long that the average person has no clue how copyright works.

A classic example of the confusion that results from these sorts of overreaching warnings is the incident involving a 9 year-old girl sketching a painting in a museum. The young artist was approached by a security guard and informed that she was breaking the law and violating Picasso’s copyright. Confused, the parents asked the girl to put her sketch pad away and gave her a brief tutorial on the concept of copyright. The problem, of course, is that she wasn’t violating any law.

How did the security guard get the idea that a sketch of a painting was a copyright violation? And why didn’t the parents make more of an issue of the incident? Likely because both the parents and the guard had been conditioned by ubiquitous copyright warnings, and had no idea how copyright actually works.

There are some who doubt that this complaint will get very far (mostly the attorneys who write these warnings), but I think it has a reasonable chance of causing the FTC to take some action. After all, we have laws requiring accurate food labeling, and laws requiring truth in advertising, why not a law requiring accurate legal disclaimers?

• Defend Fair Use

Illegal downloads are a problem. I maintain — because frankly, the RIAA has offered nothing in the way of hard evidence — that the amount of money being lost is quite a bit less than what the press releases suggest. I believe this simply because every download does not represent a lost sale. In many cases, the songs would have gone unsold, unheard, unnoticed.

The value of the songs is also overstated. One recent article put the value of songs at $7.87. Presumably, this amount includes damages and potential litigation costs. Regardless, it distorts the worth of the copyrighted property and makes it near-impossible to have reasonable discussions about the value of music. Let’s face it: the Spice Girls are way over and should be grateful that anyone wants to listen to their songs. They were a point-in-time band that I can’t imagine oldies radio remembering fondly.

To date, the RIAA has done very little to work with its customers to find positive ways to provide music to colleges students and others. This is the group that is trying, very hard, to kill Internet radio. While Congress recently introduced legislation to charge more reasonable fees to Internet broadcasters. You can imagine the teeth-gnashing and seething happening in the halls of the RIAA — I remain more convinced than ever that the music industry does not like music nor its customers.

We have had a serious, stable environment for downloading music for a good ten years now. A decade in real life is a century in Internet time. The technology has grown, matured, and changed multiple times. Yet the music industry remains stuck in the traditional business mode. They still see iTunes as an experiment. “Those iPod thingies? They’re just a fad. Kids will go back to listening to AM radio any day now!”

The industry continues to fight flexibility and reasonable pricing. My guess is that artists aren’t being fairly compensated for the cost savings digital media offers. Of course, all their potential proceeds are being eaten up by legal costs. How can the labels give the artists more money when lawyers are so expensive?

So the consumers aren’t winning, the artists aren’t winning, and if single sales via the Internet don’t start to fill the gap left by declining CD sales, then the labels aren’t winning. Given the lose-lose-lose situation happening in the music industry, one wonders just how much money the RIAA is pocketing to “fight” piracy — clearly it’s enough to stop the organization from looking for positive steps forward.

Steve Samwell, the creator of the concept of filing frivolous lawsuits against the producers of hit TV Shows, Films and Records, has today announced that he will file a lawsuit against “everyone in the past 40 years who has filed a lawsuit claiming that their idea was stolen.” Mr. Samwell is asserting that these people have stolen his intellectual property and are profiting from that theft.

Mr. Samwell is claiming that he pioneered the concept of the frivolous lawsuit when he sued Mel Brooks, Buck Henry and rest of the creators of the hit TV Show Get Smart in March of 1967 claiming it was based upon an unpublished short story that he had sent to Look Magazine in 1958. The story was called “Casino Royal Screw-up,” and it was a James Bond parody centering on the antics of Secret Agent Charles Crafty, code-named “Double Oh Double” and his highly attractive partner, Agent Heh, code named “Sixty-Nine.”

While Mr. Brooks and Mr. Henry claimed that they had never seen the short story, it was faster and less expensive to settle with Mr. Samwell for an undisclosed amount. Mr. Samwell claims that this precipitated a four-decade revenue stream for other individuals who filed similar lawsuits.

“I’ve been watching the progress of this for many years — starting with the ‘My Sweet Lord’ case, and the lawsuit against John Fogerty, right up through the recent “Mrs. Mom” suit against Rainier Wolfcastle — each one seems more frivolous than the previous one.” Still, Mr. Samwell sat upon the sidelines, and never once raised a finger while others profited from his idea.

When asked why he decided to file his lawsuit after nearly four decades, he won’t mention anything specifically, but he does point to the latest lawsuit against the TV show Heroes, as an typical suit that he plans to take action about.

“When I saw that they were suing that TV show with all of the superhero types that been around forever, I thought that it just might be the most frivolous lawsuit I’d ever seen. They are totally infringing on my intellectual property. And I really need to get a piece of the action.”

• New York artists sue NBC over Heroes