Let the Lawyers hit the floor
Jed | July 17, 2007This video is downright hilarious, but it also highlights a problem with our current system of content control. This song is copyrighted. The video clips (used from A&E) are copyrighted and probably fall outside of the limited rights afforded by fair-use. So technically, this video is illegal.
But isn’t this also a new piece of art? Whoever thought to put these things together is pretty creative. I think we’d all prefer if artists and other creative-types were free to create mashups as long as it doesn’t impact the pocketbooks of the original copyright owners. For example, A&E isn’t going to lose out on advertising revenue because people are watching this video instead of their show.
In fact, as I’ve mentioned in other posts, there’s tremendous promotional value in these types of mashups. This video will only encourage more people to buy the song and/or watch A&E.
But what usually happens in this situation is that the original content holders get greedy. They want to make money off of every single use of their content. Even though it doesn’t hurt them and might even help them, they don’t like this new world that they can’t control. So they use the out-of-date legal system to maintain the status-quo. After all, that’s what they’re used to, and change is scary. But who loses out? We do.
I’m amazed this clip is still available. I’m very curious to see when it gets taken down, and which side (RIAA or MPAA) pulls out the lawyers first.
As one of my favorite bloggers at Techdirt has said (I’m paraphrasing), “a lot of people are going to have to die for this to change.” That doesn’t mean that these people should be off’d, just that we’re going to have to wait until this whole generation of people retire or otherwise pass on and a new generation that grew up with the internet comes to power. Hopefully by then we’ll see some common sense come into the world of intellectual property.
