More on the “We Con the World” controversy

Caroline Glick at her website discusses YouTube’s outrageous deletion of the “We Con the World” video, describes the Fair Use Doctrine which allows parodies of copyrighted works, and tells where alternative copies can be found. One of her commenters, Barrister, writes:

The original song has been parodied numerous times since its release in the 1980s, and You Tube continues to broadcast many of these other parodies. For example:

* The “In Living Color” parody called “Career Aid” has a theme of donating to help the careers of former recording artists whose popularity has waned. This video is available on YouTube in several places, including here.

* Saturday Night Live not only presented the recent parody of the 2010 remake, which is available on YouTube here, but also broadcast a parody of the original version during the 1990s.

* The Weird Al Yankovic parody decries music downloading, a la Napster, and is available on several YouTube locations, including here.

None of these many parodies are being purged from YouTube for copyright violations or for being either racist or insensitive to a famine that occurred in the mid-1980s.

Finally, the authors of the original, Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie, have themselves been parodied countless times. In fact, the “Career Aid” parody includes a character playing Lionel Ritchie.

Another commenter says that since YouTube (which is owned by Google) blocks videos in which Israelis defend themselves, a new Web video outfit is needed, called JewTube.

Other commenters point out, however, that under existing law, the moment there is a single complaint about a copyright violation, YouTube is required to take the video down. That decision can then be protested by a counter-filing. The argument is that YouTube did not do anything wrong here, but was acting under the existing copyright law which is the real problem.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 14, 2010 02:31 PM | Send