Activision hires Rudy Giuliani to fight Noriega’s ‘Call of Duty’ suit
Rudy Giuliani is back to denouncing “an evil, heinous criminal,” as he put it. This time, it’s Manuel Noriega.
Activision Blizzard Inc. has hired the former New York City mayor who presided during the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to fight a lawsuit brought by the former military dictator of Panama over his depiction in the video game “Call of Duty: Black Ops II.”
Activision plans to file a request to dismiss the lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Monday, the Santa Monica company said.
Noriega is seeking royalties and damages for the use of his likeness in the hit video game without his permission.
Activision’s main argument is that Noriega’s fame derives from being a key figure in political events, not from any sort of “creative labor.” Creators of books, TV shows, movies and video games should be able to borrow from history to express context and add some “historical flavor,” according to Activision.
Courts have sometimes treated video games differently from other forms of creative content, and bringing Giuliani on board suggests Activision wants to put a quick end to that.
“We’re doing it for an entire community of movies, video games and books -- this whole art form of historical fiction,” Giuliani, a partner at Bracewell & Giuliani LLP, said in a phone interview. “The attack on video games is no different than movies, books. They are all the same for free-speech protection.”
Lawyers for Noriega did not immediately return calls seeking comment.
Other public figures are depicted in “Black Ops II,” including former U.S. Gen. David Petraeus, and there’s a ship called U.S.S. Barack Obama.
Giuliani said if Noriega can get away with this, “Osama bin Laden’s relatives could sue [the film] ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ and we could go on and on.”
He pointed to the 2011 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association as the “prevailing authority that movie games are no different than movies and books.” In the 7-2 decision, the court struck down a California law that banned the sale of violent video games to children after finding that video games were a form of protected speech.
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