Saturday, February 10, 2007

Viacom 100,000 Take Downs

A few weeks back, I posted two video segments Chad and I made for a friend's bachelor party. The video segments were straight-up parody (which is protected speech), not-for-profit, and terribly funny. If you scroll back to these two posts you'll find that the videos no longer work. The reason they don't, is because Viacom sent 100,000 cease and desist letters to YouTube. YouTube promptly removed all of the alleged offending content, without verifying if any of the content actually broke their rules. Chad's videos were removed as a result of the take down.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.Org) is attempting to gather examples of clips that were unnecessarily removed. So far, several cases have been reported including a home video of people eating a restaurant--obviously having nothing to do with Viacom. They have put together a simple a video to pass around to people who may have been affected by the take down. I include the video at the bottom of the post, in the hopes that Chad follows up with them. Our work is both parody and a form of fair use falling under the "mash-up" style of expression which is increasing in popularity.


No comments: