Patterico's Pontifications

6/14/2010

Ben Sheffner: YouTube Was Right to Take Down “We Con the World” Satire

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 6:52 am



Sheffner says:

Now the pro-Israel and conservative blogosphere is up in arms, claiming that this incident is an example of “Israel’s enemies … trying to silence us,” and “YouTube …com[ing] down against the Israeli side in its editorial decisions,” and even “a blatant act of Jew-hatred.” Utter and complete nonsense. First of all, YouTube — with extremely rare exceptions — simply removes videos upon receipt of facially valid DMCA notices, no questions asked, and no legal analysis performed. YouTube — which receives a very large volume of DMCA notices — doesn’t evaluate the political content of videos when acting on infringement notices; it simply removes the videos. And do these people attacking YouTube seriously believe that a company whose parent was founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page (both Jewish), and a music publishing company whose parent is run by Edgar Bronfman, Jr. (son of a former president of the World Jewish Congress), were motivated by anti-Israel bias or “Jew Hatred”? Seriously?

Moreover, defenders of the video are wrong on the law. . . . [P]ut simply: a parody comments on the work itself; a satire uses the work to comment on something else. I think a court would most likely find that , under Campbell, the “We Con the World” video is a satire — not a parody. It uses the “We are the World” composition to comment on the Gaza flotilla, “to get attention or to avoid the drudgery in working up something fresh”; any claim that it’s actually commenting on the original song is weak at best.

As Sheffner notes, when a court rules your work to be a satire instead of a parody, you usually lose.

The thing is, legally speaking, he’s almost certainly right.

But I have gotten into spirited arguments with Ben about whether this is the way it should be. I think that setting the law against clever satire is a major imposition on free speech, with a very flimsy copyright justification.

But that’s the way the law is, until someone changes it. Go read Ben’s post for much more.

P.S. If Ben would like to hash out online the issue of whether the First Amendment should protect satire, I extend this invitation to have an inter-blog discussion of the issue. He makes as good a case as anyone could make.

8 Responses to “Ben Sheffner: YouTube Was Right to Take Down “We Con the World” Satire”

  1. well, not having listened to it, you could still dress it up as parody, because you can say you are mocking the shallowness of the orginal effort.

    Aaron Worthing (e7d72e)

  2. Exactly, We Are the World is sappy and unrealistic. The satire is a parody. Two jokes in one.

    Arizona Bob (e8af2b)

  3. Well, geeze louise – good thing it wasn’t irony, huh? They’d probably have the kids shot for that.

    Parody, satire, whatever. It’s none of the court’s business what particular flavor of humor it it. It’s speech, that’s all the court has to know.

    Frank Drebbin (8096f2)

  4. Not having listened to it? Let me fix that right now. Here’s my upload of that video, which I believe has pretty much gone viral.

    John Hitchcock (9e8ad9)

  5. I guess this means that Paul Schaeffer (sp?) is in trouble for every song that he does, since they’re all satire.

    Guess he has the money and influence to defend himself, though.

    NavyspyII (df615d)

  6. do these people attacking YouTube seriously believe that a company whose parent was founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page (both Jewish), and a music publishing company whose parent is run by Edgar Bronfman, Jr. (son of a former president of the World Jewish Congress), were motivated by anti-Israel bias or “Jew Hatred”? Seriously?

    Jews in America are not the same as Jews in Israel! Too many are hard left liberals, most voted for the most liberal senator ever for president. Liberalsim is their religion, and they will throw Israel under the bus to advance it’s causes!

    Chris falcone (471320)

  7. NavyspyII, interesting point about Paul Shanklin (I assume that’s who you meant, i.e., Rush’s guy, not David Letterman’s). Does anyone reading this blog know if he gets permission for the songs he spoofs? I know that Weird Al does, but more out of comity than any legal obligation (since in his case, the joke generally IS on the original song/artist).

    Xrlq (1cd5bb)

  8. a) P.J O’Rourke fisked “We Are The World” decades ago. I seem to recall it was in “Give War A Chance”

    b) ALL current copyright law is an abortion pushed through by special interests, and no longer bears anything resembling its expressly stated purpose, “To promote the Sciences and the Arts”. It’s one of the reasons so many people feel totally unbounded by it. It needs a total and complete overhaul, and if that involves cutting out the fatcat middle-men who “do nothing, create nothing, they just stand there in between and take their cut” then pardon me while I break out and tune the world’s smallest violin for their woes.

    John Perry Barlow wrote an excellent piece on the future of copyright over 15 years ago:

    The Economy of Ideas
    A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age. (Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong.)

    As someone who has worked in the software industry for decades, what he said then was and still is spot on.

    The recent issues with YouTube — this and the whole “Hitler” controversy — show what a useless abortion all of international copyright law is, and why the average person tends to consider it with nothing but contemptible derision.

    IgotBupkis, President, United Anarchist Society (79d71d)


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