YouTube blocks “We Con the World”

Lydia McGrew writes:

Carolyn Glick has reported that YouTube has pulled the “We Con the World” video. There are still copies available; I gather this is because so many people are just uploading it again and again. It had 3 million views before they first took it down. The allegation: Copyright violation against Warner—I gather, the company that owns the copyright on the original “We Are the World.” This sounds like some kind of bad joke. How many Youtubes are there of home videos showing people singing _actual songs_ that are under copyright, sitting around with a guitar? In this case, they didn’t even use the same words. It’s obviously a ridiculous, anti-Israel move.

LA replies:

I just tried to play VFR’s copy of the song, and a message appears saying, “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Warner/Chappel Music, Inc.”

Unbelievable. Since when does the owner of a song have rights to a parody on that song? To infringe on a copyright, an object must be “confusingly similar” to the original, which is obviously not the case here. It seems to me that Latma TV’s own copy could still be linked at their site, and people could run it from there. But maybe YouTube is constructed in such a way that it has the ability to block any YouTube video, no matter where the video file is hosted and posted.

Lydia replies:

I encourage readers to search now for a copy that can still be found (for example here), download copies for their own use, and either re-post to Youtube to keep Youtube busy trying to eradicate them all or else, if they have space on free-standing personal web sites, post to their personal web sites and send links. (For some reason the copy I just linked does not have the names of the performers and producers at the very end, which is a bit of a loss, but other copies may have that, as well.) My perception is that this video has already gone viral, and neither Warner nor Youtube can put the genie back in the bottle.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 13, 2010 03:08 PM | Send