Cindy Lee Garcia said she'd been had. The actress claimed that she thought she was acting in an action-adventure thriller called Desert Warrior, but her performance was co-opted into five seconds of Innocence of Muslims, a 14-minute trailer mocking the Islamic prophet Mohammed that sparked an anti-American backlash in the Middle East and led to death threats for the actors involved. The inflammatory clip was first uploaded to Google-owned YouTube in June 2012, and a few months later Garcia sued Google demanding that what she called the "hateful anti-Islamic production" be taken down.

Garcia first filed a suit in Los Angeles Superior Court, but a judge refused to have it removed, even as she claimed she was receiving death threats. She then filed a suit in federal court, yielding the same response. After all, video creators own the rights to their creations, not actors. Last year, however, a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals shocked First Amendment and copyright attorneys around the country when it found in Garcia's favor, determining that her performance was “independently copyrightable." Google removed the video.

Yesterday, video creators and distributors, including some of the world's biggest Internet companies, were relieved when a larger panel of Ninth Circuit judges reversed the court's earlier decision. At stake in the suit was a crucial question: Who can claim control of a video? If an actress could determine the fate of a video online, then couldn't anyone involved in a video production try to get a clip they're unhappy with taken down? The court in its latest ruling was unwilling to allow for such a future—a stark reminder that, at a time when video is more easily shot and shared than ever before, your image can easily slip beyond your control.

Controlling the Message

For Garcia, that realization came too late. In her suit, she claimed she owned the rights to her performance. Just as HBO could demand an illegally uploaded clip of Game of Thrones should be removed from YouTube, Garcia said her demand should be honored, too, because her performance was used in a different way than in which she had agreed. But Circuit Judge M. Margaret McKeown wrote in the decision issued yesterday that upholding Garcia's claim would “enable any contributor from a costume designer down to an extra or best boy to claim copyright in random bits and pieces of a unitary motion picture."

'Everything you and I and the rest of the world upload to YouTube is protected the moment we hit record.' Matthew Schruers

If the earlier decision had not been reversed, detractors of Garcia's claim said, it would mean video creators would need to prove that anyone involved in their production had waived their rights to be a part of it—otherwise those participants would be able to request their performance be removed at a later point in time.

That would become a serious problem for Hollywood studios, but also for any video creators posting their own content on YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, or even Periscope, says Matthew Schruers, a vice president of law and policy at the Computer and Communications Industry Association, who wrote a legal brief defending Google and YouTube. "After the initial decision was turned on its head, anyone who appeared on a video and offered an independent expression could lay hands on that video," Schruers says. "It would cause gridlock. There’s no way to police that.”

If Garcia's claim had been upheld, creators argued that video participants could demand their performance be removed, or an entire video removed, if they didn't like the content or message of the video. "A weak copyright claim cannot justify censorship in the guise of authorship," McKeown wrote. In other words, the First Amendment and copyright law protect a creator's control over video content, even if participants aren't happy with how they appear.

The Decisive Moment

That argument may seem obvious for traditional films and TV shows, where participants get a script and are paid for their performance. It's also easy to comprehend for documentaries, where participants are typically well aware they're being filmed and understand why. But in our very wired world, where nearly everyone has a video-recording device in their pocket and the power to upload that video instantly—it also means that nearly anyone, filmed nearly anywhere, cannot lay claim to their image, at least under copyright law—one of the most powerful legal tools creators themselves have often wielded to get content quickly removed from the Internet.

Garcia, for her part, continues to maintain that she did not know that her acting would be used to participate in “a production that would result in casting her in a controversy over an attack on Americans in Benghazi and putting her life, the lives of her family and others at risk," according to a press release sent out by her attorneys, who added that she was unlikely to appeal further.

“What happened to Garcia was awful. And we can all agree on that,” says Corynne McSherry, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who also wrote a legal brief defending Google and YouTube in the dispute. "But the court took a bad situation for one person and made it a bad situation for a lot of people."

Because of the court's latest decision, control of content is back in the hands of its creators. Tom Cruise can't demand HBO's Scientology documentary Going Clear be removed from the Internet based on copyright claims of his image. But by that same logic, you too can't demand a clip with your face be removed from YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, or Meerkat. "Everything you and I and the rest of the world upload to YouTube," Schruers says, "is protected the moment we hit record."