How My Love For John Travolta Got Me Sued
Last weekend we hosted the annual Rusnak Barn Smash, a yearly weekend of friends, music, and fire on our two acre rural property. It is one of my most favourite weekends of the year as we watch two worlds amalgamate. My husband and I have very different circles of friends and we chase after very different hobbies and endeavours. But, for one weekend of the year, those two worlds collide and our homestead becomes a melting pot of interesting characters, great conversation, lots of laughter, and ridiculous fun jamming to the music of our collective youth.
Years ago, I served as a youth group leader. This year, for the first time ever, some of those kids I watched grow up joined us around the fire. John, a longtime friend and superhero cheerleader of everything I do, was on a mission to learn how everyone in attendance knew myself and my husband.
“What I remember most about Alanna,” said one of those kids from back in the day, “is how crazy she was about John Travolta.”
I laughed and said, “I love that that’s what you remember me for!”
I wear my heart on my sleeve (and the walls of my living room and that shelf of old VHS movies and the stack of magazines that showcase JT on the cover - I just bought a MAD magazine issue from 1978 that I found in the basement of a comic book store in Waterloo) that features a full spoof of Saturday Night Fever so it’s no wonder most people who encounter me in real life don’t have to wonder where my affections lie.
I remember the instant I fell in love. It was 1996 and the cusp of the golden age of John Woo action movies. I was watching Broken Arrow. And there HE was. It was that moment when John Travolta feathered his fingers as he smoked a cigarette. I’ve never been the same since.
My high school history teacher heard me gushing about him and thought she had the cure. She invited me to spend a couple lunch hours in the classroom, watching her copy of Grease while she heckled from the back with her Tupperware salad. Did it work? Of course not! He’s ridiculously cool AND he can sing? Forget about it. There was nowhere else to go but deeper into the pit of Travolta obsession.
(If you’d like a little clip of me as a passionate teenage fan, please enjoy this not-at-all-embarrrassing video as a seventeen-year-old me talks about cloning my favourite celebrity.)
I am nothing if I am not loyal, and through the years I have remained true to that man. To a fault. We’ve seen many ups and downs together, and yet there I stand, always by his side (figuratively speaking, of course). I even bought his book, Propeller One-Way Night Coach, possibly one of the very worst books every published by a celebrity next to Grapefruit by Yoko Ono - I own that one too, but only because John Lennon wrote the foreword. I have a thing for men named John apparently. (Speaking of, if you see Johnny Depp, let him know I’m thinking of him.) I also realize it’s wildly ironic that the friend sitting at the Rusnak Barn Smash fire is also named John and I love him deeply too. It’s a thing. I’m okay with it.
I’ve told you about John Travolta before. Way back at the beginning of First Friday stories I shared about a friend of a friend who attended an event that John Travolta also attended. When I shared that story it was just a cheeky essay on FOMO. When I posted it, I did so with an innocent thumbnail of John at that very event.
And, because of that thumbnail, my business’s 2024 profit margin took a massive hit.
When you go into business on your own, it’s with good intentions and high expectations. BUT. When you go into business on your own you don’t have a team to run ideas by or a legal department to make sure you aren’t breaking any rules. I have learned a lot of lessons the hard way since striking out on this adventure, but this lesson was the biggest punch in the gut - not because it wasn’t a lesson I didn’t need to learn, but because it was connected to the man I’ve loved since 1996. (Coincidentally, I also started dating my husband in 1996. I have now loved two different men for identical periods of time and I’ve only just had that realization.)
That “thumbnail” was an image I pulled off Google when I searched for the event I was talking about in my story. It had no watermarks or attached copyright information at all. This is not to make an excuse for myself, but to prove my naivete.
The original photo was, in fact, owned by a UK news corporation who, using internet crawlers (I’m postulating, of course) seek out images for which they hold the copyright and thus pad their pockets by issuing massive fines to unsuspecting website owners that do not (in my opinion) match the crime.
And it is a crime. You can’t just take a photo from Google and share it somewhere else. The goblins will get you. And I think I lived to tell the tale so you might protect yourself in the future. Seriously. If you have a website and use any images you don’t have the rights to TAKE THEM DOWN RIGHT NOW!
I ignored the first two “calls to action” because I thought they were spam. It’s a little harder to ignore registered mail. With Exhibit 1: screenshots of my indiscretion - I was dead (read: devastated) in the water.
Not one to shy away from a fight (I’m John Woo educated, remember"? - Hey, another John! 🤯) I pushed back with the low analytics from that post, proof that it generated ZERO income, and a snarky bit of “you’re a predatory snake.” I was able to negotiate the fine down from thousands to hundreds. Many hundreds, but even though I was losing, it still felt like a little win.
I was wildly embarrassed having endured this unfair “swift hand of the law” and told no one. I was going to take it to the grave. My business finances are kept fully separate from our family finances so my husband would never know I sent a new-guitars-worth of money to a copyright infringement lawyer. But then, on a day when I wasn’t the one to pick up the mail, a followup letter arrived with “Barrister [Full Name and Law Firm Here]” in bold above the return address.
“I think you’re getting sued,” my husband said, joking, holding the letter addressed to Chicken House Press.
“No, I’m not,” I said. “I already was.”
He was, of course, horrified for me when I told him, but the confusion and frustration settled quickly when I explained how I could have chosen to go to JURIED COURT, where I might win (but still have to pay my own lawyer, unless I counter-sued) or I might lose (AND HAVE TO PAY TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS). Looking back, I believe so much of their tactic was to instill fear in me. Chicken House Press is doing okay, but no way do I have $20K sitting in a bank account waiting for a rainy day.
My exact thought process:
It could be good writing research to actually experience a real court case…
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I could win because they’re probably betting on me being scared and just paying the fine up front so if it went to court they probably wouldn’t even show up because its a piddly little lawsuit and definitely not worth their time so it would get thrown out and I’d be in the clear…
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But they have Exhibit 1. I was caught red-handed. So if I lose (because, let’s face it, I am guilty) and they do actually ask for the $20,000 they say they can push for, I won’t be able to pay that, and then could they put me in jail…?
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Going to jail would be some crazy good writing research and think of all that time I’d have to write… but…
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I’d be really stressed leading up to it and what if it takes years to get before a judge? I don’t think I can handle the not knowing, so I should probably just pay the fine and move on with my life.
Never once did my husband shame me or ask me to abandon my heart for John Travolta, so to celebrate, I hung three laser disc covers on the wall from the 70s and 80s. Now I see the poster artwork for Perfect, Blow Out, and Saturday Night Fever every single day. Besides, it wasn’t John Travolta who sued me. He would never. My spirits are not dampened, nor is my heart hardened.
The good news is I put legal fees into my budget last year. The bad news is I didn’t put enough. But, live and learn. 2024 will just be one more year without that new iMac I really want.
If you take nothing else from this story, take away an understanding that copyright is serious business. If you’re working on a manuscript or even a blog, remember that unless you’ve obtained proper permissions, you can’t include things like lyrics, you certainly can’t include photos you don’t have rights to, and you definitely can’t plagiarize someone else’s work as your own.
In the Chicken House Press contract I require all authors to affirm that they own all content within their manuscripts. It has been a long-standing value of mine and I’m so disappointed in myself that I didn’t honour that value when I took that image from Google.
I guess the moral of the story is that you should use your own photos. So, it sounds like I need to head on down to Ocala and grab some selfies with my favourite guy. How about it, John? What are you doing next weekend?
Note: the newsletter version of this story contained a GIF of the Broken Arrow scene that ruined me. I was going to also post it here, but then I read this article from Forbes, and while I truly believe my intentions fall within fair use, it’s not worth the potential risk of any more of this craziness.
