{"id":10625,"date":"2007-09-24T14:31:25","date_gmt":"2007-09-24T18:31:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/09\/24\/10625.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:56:58","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:56:58","slug":"its-got-a-good-beat-and-i-coul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/09\/24\/its-got-a-good-beat-and-i-coul\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s got a good beat, and I could dance to it if I weren’t so old."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the business section of this morning’s Times<\/I>, Brooks Barnes asks Disney Tolerates a Rap Parody of Its Critters. But Why?<\/a> The background, for Gentle Readers who, like YHB, don’t really get YouTube and popular culture more generally, is that it’s become common for people to create and distribute videos of popular songs, home-made by editing together animated (usually) footage to make it appear as though Pooh Bear or SpongeBob or Goku is singing a current pop chart. The specific case Mr. Barnes (I had to do TSOR to keep from referring to Mr. Barnes as Ms. Barnes) brings up is of “Crank That (Soulja Boy)”, a nearly eponymous song by Soulja Boy (of whom YHB had never heard) which appears to owe at least some of its tremendous popularity to a series of such mash-ups. The video<\/a> is easy to find, if you are interested.\n

Mr. Barnes notes that Disney is notoriously eager to slap suits on anybody using licensed DisneyShit™, but that they have yet to shut down this particular mash-up. He also claims that Nickelodeon considered mash-ups to be fair use, but only quotes the Nickelodeon spokesman saying that ““Our audiences can creatively mash video from our content as much and as often as they like,” which gives permission, rather than claiming that no permission is needed.\n

So, is this mash-up fair use? I wouldn’t want to argue it in front of a judge. The four tests for fair use are (1) life is suffering, (ii) suffering is caused by desire, (c) suffering and desire end when enlightenment occurs, and (Γ) there is a path to enlightenment. Wait, no, I’ll start again.\n

The four tests for fair use are the purpose, the nature, the quantity, and the effect of the use. In a mash-up, the purpose is quite clearly to entertain, not to educate, critique or describe. Fail. The nature of the work sampled is commercial; in the case of The Heffalump Movie<\/a>, rather disgustingly so. Fail. The quantity is minuscule; the video is less than four minutes, and most of it is a few clips repeated a bunch of times, so I suspect that there is maybe a minute and a half of footage out of a 68-minute movie. Pass. The effect of the use ... well, Disney’s Attorneybots could get up and argue that by associating their child-friendly cartoon characters with a rather sweet-looking but undeniably dark-skinned teenage popstar, the defendants were debasing those characters and making them less attractive in the marketplace. The defendants attorneys (or Attorneybots, should there be a big old defense fund) could argue that Disney’s Attorneybot were talking out of their synthetic asses, and that there was no possible way that anyone who was thinking about buying such a hunk of shit as The Heffalump Movie<\/I> would be dissuaded by the availability of a four-minute video with a trifle of the footage. Then the judge would have to decide.\n

So. Two obvious fails, one pass, and one judge’s-whim out of four. Not really a very good score.\n

Nor could the mash-up artist plausibly claim that he was parodying Heffalump<\/I>. He could, possibly, swing a claim that he was parodying Souljah Boy by associating his repetitive dance track with some even more obviously crappy, commercial and scare-quotable “art”. I wouldn’t buy it, but I ain’t a judge (or an attorneybot or even an attorney, I should mention).\n

No, this is clearly a derivative work of art, making use of previous works, possibly enhancing them through the complicated web of reference we use to knit our frames to experience life through, but rather explicitly prohibited by our current law. Ahem<\/a>: “Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work.”\n

That law may suck<\/I>, but it sure is the law. It would be nice if the New York Times reporter who specializes in this stuff knew it, and explained it, and further mentioned that if the result of that law was ridiculous to everybody concerned that there exists a process of legislation to change it.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the business section of this morning\u2019s Times, Brooks Barnes asks Disney Tolerates a Rap Parody of Its Critters. But Why? The background, for Gentle Readers who, like YHB, don\u2019t really get YouTube and popular culture more generally, is that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nytimes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10625"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18116,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10625\/revisions\/18116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}