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EFF Assails YouTube For Removing "Downfall" Parodies
Locke2005 writes "In what promises to be one of the quickest threads to become Godwin'ed, YouTube has pulled scores of parodies of the 'Hitler Finds Out' scene from the movie The Downfall. Ironically, I had never heard of this movie before this — and now I want to watch it." Here is the EFF complaint. David Weinberger has posted some details on Google's Content Identification tool, which is being used in the shotgun takedowns.
und ich bin erste!
(first post, thread is now godwinned)
Wait till Hitler finds out about this!!! woooooohhh boy!!
This is rather stupid, considering the director of Downfall watches them and likes them. In fact, in his own words "I think I've seen about 145 of them! Of course, I have to put the sound down when I watch. Many times the lines are so funny, I laugh out loud, and I'm laughing about the scene that I staged myself! You couldn't get a better compliment as a director." http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/01/the_director_of_downfall_on_al.html
- Aetheral Research -
The funny part is, I never would have heard about the movie(and subsequently bought a copy on DVD) if not for the Youtube parodies. Free advertising? Bah!
the impoverishment of our culture
no story, no art, is ever original. it all borrows or reinvents or reinterprets something that came before. and if the thread of our cultural output is artificially taxed strained and stamped out for demands for cash, then all of us, all of our lives, are less rich for that
maybe content creators would understand that parodies like this downfall clip actually create interest in the original, and are really just a form of advertisement. instead, imagine all the culturally relevant art that we will never see and can never see the light of day because a greedy selfish system would rather lock art behind lock and key, where it earns no cash, rather than let it get out there and bloom, and create more art, and create more COMMERCE
art, music, movies, all creative output has the unique property of being richer when it is allowed to flow freely and freely intermingle. why do we have to lead less rich cultural lives only because some fucking trolls in the bank vault can't see that? that if there were no such thing as intellectual property, the ancillary streams they could tap in the free flow of cultural output would be richer sources of cash than their feeble and failed approaches to control what they cannot and will never be able to control?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yeah! I never would have heard about the movie and subsequently downloaded it from The Pirate Bay if not for the Youtube parodies too!
I received a "Notice of potential infringement" from YouTube very soon after posting this one a week ago. The video, which had initially been accessible, was pulled from the site.
There was an option to appeal the takedown notice, and I filled it out, providing as a reason "Parody is a recognized fair use under US copyright law." I'm actually not sure if you can play the fair-use card when using the content owner's IP to mock an unrelated subject, but in any event, the appeal seemed to be accepted by YouTube, because access to the video was restored within a few hours.
So, for what it's worth, if your video gets pulled by Youtube, try filling out the appeal form.
He only does that because he's a nice guy though. Legally he could put any of his parodies on his CDs if he wanted to.
"We need to get over this notion, that, for Apple to win... Microsoft must lose." - Steve Jobs, 1997
making a parody where the subtitles are the only original content and everything else is from the copyrighted work is not gonna fly in court.
It doesn't matter, for the purpose of determining fair use, how much additional material was added. Rather, it depends on how much of the underlying work was used, and how important that portion was to the underlying work. Your criterion is often invoked by infringers who legitimately claim that because they added so much to the portion used, their use was fair, and is just as often rejected by the courts, who don't care about that.
In any event, this isn't "the entirety of the video from 'The Downfall.'" The Hitler scene is just one part -- albeit a rather powerful part -- of an entire movie about the last days of the Nazis in Berlin during the war.
Of course, the thing that might trip them up is the ridiculous dividing line that the courts have been drawing between parody and satire. When a use is a parody, it makes fun of the underlying work itself, and therefore must draw at least somewhat from that underlying work, in order to come about. It is essentially commentary that ridicules the work, or is at least itself ridiculous. Imagine, for example, making fun of Mickey Mouse and Disney by having the Sorcerer's Apprentice scene from Fantasia involve Mickey summoning up a destructive horde of copyright attorneys. (We are indeed capable of reproducing by fragmentation; fear us) That could be a parody.
Satires, however, are making a point about society generally, or at least about something other than the underlying work. In that case, it doesn't absolutely need to borrow from an underlying work, and the courts have not been as generous to satire as they have been to parody. For example, there was a case in which someone was making fun of the OJ Simpson trial by using Dr. Seuss characters and artwork. Because the use wasn't commenting on the used material, but just borrowing it for an unrelated purpose (unless OJ was right, and the murderer was the Lorax or something), it wound up not being a fair use.
Now, I think this is a dumb distinction. The main issue should be whether the use is transformative, even if it doesn't 'need' to use the underlying work (although a showing of necessity should count for something, considering other doctrines, such as merger, where it is also relevant), along with the rest of the fair use analysis, in particular, the fourth factor (harm to the market for the underlying work). But that's what we're stuck with at the moment. And since most of the Downfall videos (though not all -- the one where Hitler is upset about how many Downfall videos there are would seem to be okay, ironically) don't make fun of anything that requires the use of Downfall in order to do it, things may not go well.
Now, how long until someone follows up on this, does a bit of research, and has Hitler upset about this particular aspect of Fair Use under US copyright law, citing the statute and caselaw? Perhaps Generals Keitel, Jodl, Krebs, and Burgdorf (the four guys that he has stay in the room) could each stand for one of the four prongs of the analysis?
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Imagine if you will that Wm. Shakespeare had to contend with modern copyright law. He's only one example - any remembered artist will do. How much of the works of "Bard of Avon" would be permitted under current law? Actually, almost none of it. A sonnet or two. And because his unsourced output was so small we would not know of him at all. England's national poet would have been silenced by copyright law as we know it. Almost all of the stories he retold as plays would now be lost forever because they were derived from bardic tales or previous plays that would have been protected by copyright. We grant him great respect now not because he invented these stories, but because he told them well .
Every play, each story, was derived or influenced - as was common in that day and should be common still - by the bardic tales passed down in oral tradition that today would be protected. It was in his wry telling of these tales, the wit that he added, that made them so durable that we know them still. If he had not retold them in his special way they would be lost to time. Today he would be Disney'd out of his art - as a great many grand geniuses are today being silenced by the tyranny of copyright monopolies.
Every creative person needs to understand and acknowledge the source of their creation, or at least that they've built upon one. And they need to submit to a future where others build upon their work. We call this evolution culture. Modern copyright law admits no such culture. Each of them needs to understand that modern copyright law dooms them to ignominy, as our current masters of culture need new sales to drive their market numbers and this works against literary immortality. It's a Devil's bargain.
And so, breeding a generation devoid of culture we reap what we sow. If kids can't adopt the culture of their parents because they're proscribed from experiencing what it was by copyright law, they will invent their own. These inventions will by necessity be primal. Primitive. Animalistic. That can be art, but it can't be durable art.
So, artists and inventors are actually harmed by the current state of law. They should oppose it as it prevents their art from going viral and being a part of our culture.
By preventing the natural course of social evolution through copyright law, we naturally regress to the primitive at an abhorrent rate. That's not the purpose of copyright enshrined in the US Constitution. The purpose of that clause was to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts."
Help stamp out iliturcy.