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Rival body shows assert rights
As competition between exhibitions heats up, a race for one in Cleveland triggers a legal fight touching on rumor and copyright issues.
By BILL DURYEA
Published August 15, 2005
Months before Premier Exhibitions agreed to bring its exhibition of dramatically dissected bodies to Tampa, it looked to Cleveland.
The Great Lakes Science Center seemed a perfect fit. In 2002, the center on the shores of Lake Erie had hosted Premier's blockbuster exhibition of Titanic artifacts, which attracted 350,000 visitors.
But the science center took a pass. Instead, it signed up with "Body Worlds," the touring exhibition owned by German businessman Gunther von Hagens that began the international craze for peering at posed cadavers.
Premier did not retreat without a fight. In a lawsuit originally filed in state court in Cleveland, Premier officials say they were elbowed aside by Plastination Inc., the parent company of "Body Worlds," alleging Plastination spread false rumors about the source of the bodies Premier displays.
Plastination Inc. turned around and sued Premier, alleging that the newcomer's "Bodies Revealed" exhibition last year in Blackpool, England, had infringed its copyright by displaying bodies in identical poses.
Premier has since contracted with the Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa, where it expects to open "Bodies, the Exhibition" on Saturday. But the continuing legal tangle in Cleveland spotlights the fierce competition for the rights to put on exhibitions in the vast and mostly untouched U.S. market.
Since 1995, when von Hagens launched his first show in Japan, "Body Worlds" has attracted an estimated 17-million visitors, reaping some $200-million in ticket and merchandise revenue. Demand is so high, von Hagens has created a second exhibition, "Body Worlds 2," and reportedly intends to soon add a third.
But a host of imitators also has sprung up, eager to grab a share of the riches. At least 10 other exhibitions, with names such as "The Universe Within," "Body Exploration" and "Mysteries of the Human Body," are circling the globe.
There's even a rival show called "Body Worlds," put on by Sui Hongjin, a former general manager for von Hagens and now the director of the Dalian Medical University's Plastination Laboratory where Premier Exhibitions acquired its bodies.
Adding to the naming confusion, Premier's show in Tampa is called "Bodies, the Exhibition." In its promotional material Premier insists this show should not be confused with "Bodies Revealed" - its own exhibition now in Seoul.
Von Hagens has not hesitated to challenge his imitators in court.
After he found himself going head to head with "Body Exploration" in a city in southern Taiwan, von Hagens filed a criminal copyright complaint, prompting Taiwanese officials to seize six figures "Body Exploration" had on display.
Of all the copycats, Premier Exhibitions, with its experience putting on the hugely profitable Titanic shows, would seem to present the greatest threat to von Hagen's domination of the worldwide market.
In August 2004, "two representatives from the (Great Lakes Science Center) traveled to England to discuss its interest in presenting Premier's "Bodies Revealed' exhibit," according to Premier's counterclaim in federal court. (Premier dropped the state suit and refiled it in federal court.)
Premier and the science center "entered negotiations, exchanging numerous drafts of a letter of intent regarding this potential exhibit," Premier's counterclaim states.
At the time, Premier alleges, von Hagens had his eye on another venue, HealthSpace Cleveland, but shifted field when he heard Premier was negotiating with the science center.
Attorneys for von Hagens say their client did not initiate contact with either HealthSpace Cleveland or the Great Lakes Science Center; they approached him.
Von Hagens, the counterclaim states, "intentionally disparaged Premier by questioning the legitimacy of Premier's acquisitions of bodies, even though Plastination knew that Premier had documents authenticating Premier's acquisition of bodies."
Von Hagens' attorneys say this is "sour grapes" on the part of Premier. They deny there was any "whisper campaign" against the rival company.
Florida's Anatomical Board, which approves the use of cadavers for medical education or research, has asked Premier to provide documentation that the dead people, or their families, consented to this use of their corpses. Premier says such documentation is impossible to obtain because the bodies, all of them Chinese, were unclaimed. The company insists the corpses, which were prepared in a laboratory in China, were acquired and imported legally.
Attorneys for Plastination deny the company or von Hagens did anything unlawful. What happened in Cleveland was nothing more than normal business competition, they said. "Great Lakes Science Center did their due diligence in checking out von Hagens' exhibitions. As you know, he had a much longer record than Premier had," Anthony DiVenere, lead trial counsel for Plastination, said.
To prove that Plastination interfered with Premier's business dealings, he said, Premier would have to prove it had a contract with the Great Lakes Science Center.
"We're not aware of any kind of contractual relationship that existed (between Premier and Great Lakes Science Center) that we could have interfered with," DiVenere said.
Though Plastination won the battle for Cleveland, the company did not allow Premier to go peacefully. In February it filed a federal copyright infringement suit against Premier.
"Many exhibits that "Bodies Revealed' had (in Blackpool) were about the exact same poses that "Body Worlds' had in their exhibitions," DiVenere said.
Premier attorneys have failed to return repeated calls for comment, but in the company's legal response it "specifically denies that the bodies comprising the Plaintiff's exhibits are copyrightable works subject to copyright protection."
Arnie Geller, president and CEO of Premier Exhibitions, said in a Chicago Tribune story in July, "From what we've seen so far, he doesn't have any copyrights that would stop other people from medically dissecting a human body for exhibition. And every body is different ... so what are we talking about?"
"The copyright issue at stake is not the material used for the display but what the rights holder has done with that material to create something new," John Eastwood, von Hagens' attorney in Taipei, wrote in an e-mail. "A music composer has copyright protection for his music, not for the individual notes; a photographer has a copyright for the image, not the photographic paper. It's not a dead body that's being copyrighted, it is the work that is made from it."
With that in mind, Plastination attorneys are eager to see what Premier unveils on Saturday when "Bodies" opens.
"If we determine any of the exhibits in Tampa are copies of Plastination's exhibits," DiVenere said, "one of the options available to us is to seek an injunction."
[Last modified August 15, 2005, 04:56:42]
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