WARNER CONTINUES TO CATCH THOSE COPYRIGHT CRIMINAL MASTERMINDS

Warner has caught two other criminal masterminds who, until now, had cunningly avoided justice and posted copyright infringing material, spreading fear and unfairness on the poor millionaires who control the music industry's lives. Their reign of terror is over, however, thanks to the ever-watchful eye of Warner and their justice tool: the YouTube's automated blocking device.

Yup, Warner is removing videos of your kids singing now, much like UMG's removal of the Lenz kid dancing to a Prince song, and why wouldn't they? they already removed thousands of videos of people playing cover tunes in their rooms, including teenagers singing without a backing track, without any kind of legal backlash or regard for fair use. Granted, in some cases it's difficult to determine weather it's fair use or not. Lets try it with these two examples, shall we?

This one features a kid lip-syncing to "Jukebox Hero" by Foreigner (who, ironically, found their new singer in YouTube singing covers). The second one is an even younger kid smacking lips to "I Love My Lips,"song originally by a cucumber in an episode of "Veggie Tales."It's unclear weather the copyright claim was for the song or the cucumber up some of these Warner executives' ass.

Thanks to the ever-alert fellows at YouTomb and the Electronic Frontier Foundation we can find about this stuff, otherwise it would go unnoticed, and the record labels would be able to get away with anything. Keep supporting them in any way, and lets put a stop to this complete abuse of copyright laws.

Corynne McSherry's article "The Fair Use Massacre Continues: Now Warner's Going After Babies"for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Pictures taken from YouTomb.

YouTomb -- you monitor us?, we'll monitor you.

Worried about how YouTube's automated video-signature flags videos and gives complete freedom to the copyright holders to block pretty much whatever they want, completely ignoring and bypassing the "fair use" clause in the U.S. Copyright Law, a student organization -MIT Free Culture- started this project hoping to reform it.

Basically, YouTomb monitors those videos on YouTube which are the most popular, often featured in other web sites, and serve as a source as to who has removed what and why. Browsing through some of the removed material, it becomes aparent some companies will claim copyright on anything. If you make a video of yourself, you better not have a mole which resembles the Mickey Mouse logo -- it would probably get removed. "Please use Mole-Swap and try again."

But I digress...

The fellows at YouTomb also keep a count on how many videos have the companies removed by themselves, WMG not surprisingly ranking at number one with over 4,600 videos taken down; counting only the claims by "WMG,"not those by "Warner Music Group" and other variations of that name which has become a euphemism for "copyright fascists."Of course, in a site of this nature, they could not lack a blog to express their thoughts and feelings about this wonderful world of corporate monopoly we're facing. Contributor Kevin Driscoll was kind enough to take some time out of his life and browse through this blog and the Living Room Rock God community and dedicating an article on YouTomb to our cause. (Thank you, Kevin!).

So, are you still wondering what happened to your favorite video in which some kitties were headbanging at the rythm of Metallica? I suggest you browse through YouTomb's content. WMG might have claimed copyright over the music... or the kitties (they might've looked like Sylvester the cat).

YouTomb's main web site.
YouTomb's stats.
Kevin Driscoll's Article: "Won’t get fooled again, hard rock fans react to Warner/Universal takedowns."