Virtual Marilyn

Have you heard all the buzz here of late?
Marilyn Monroe is coming back to life … to a degree.

On Thursday, Oct. 2, the Daily Mail of London, along with a host of news networks here and abroad, reported that the Delaware-based Virtual Marilyn LLC (Digiconmedia.net) is in federal court fighting the New York-based Marilyn Monroe estate on the company’s claim of being “the federal copyright owner of an audiovisual work and character artwork depicting a computer-generated virtual actress adopting the persona of Marilyn Monroe.”

It’s a far-reaching and complicated case in which the “virtual company” claims to own the rights of the deceased actress, which includes her name, likeness, signature and voice. The company claims that Monroe’s persona rights “died along with the actress in 1962 and were never owned by her estate.”
In February 2012, the United States Copyright Office granted copyright registrations to “VM2” (Virtual Marilyn Monroe) for a “computer-generated virtual actress adopting the persona of Marilyn Monroe and of original computer-generated characters adopting the personas of celebrated people.”

In responding to the government’s official recognition of virtual actors (“Vactors”) and their digital creators as a protected species, Becky Altringer, manager of Digiconmedia, which holds the exclusive licensing rights of the copyright, stated: “The U.S. Copyright Office’s registration of VM2 as a virtual actress adopting the persona of Marilyn Monroe is a milestone in the convergence of Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the Internet. Advances in computer generated animation and global broadband Internet links now make it viable for a virtual personality to ‘live’ in cyberspace and interact with a global Internet audience.”
“The case could have massive implications for the estates of other dead celebrities who have failed to register their image rights before their deaths,” notes the Daily Mail.

Special Prophetic Interest
This story holds very special interest to us at this time because of what we read in Revelation 13:15 in the Bible. It is a very familiar scripture to all who have ever heard of something called “the image of the beast.”

“And there was given to him (the “false prophet”) power to give breath to the image of (the antichrist), so that it could speak and cause all who refuse to worship the image to be killed.”

The ability to take the “likeness and persona” of a real person and translate such traits into a counterfeit lookalike in such a way as to make the counterfeit appear as real as its human model could only occur in times of extremely advanced technology. The Bible predicts that such capabilities would exist in the “latter days,” just before the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Invitation
This breaking news perfectly corresponds with our preparation for the next edition of
the Revelation File Forum on Sunday, October 19, from 4pm to 6pm at Encourager Church in Houston. The topic is “Revelation 13 Revisited.” This very subject of digital replicas to real human beings is one of the several elements of this multimedia presentation.

It’s free to attend, but an offering will be taken.