In honor of the ever worsening economic crisis in the United States I thought I’d post this College Humor remix of the SuperBowl XLII E-trade investor baby commercial overdubbed with a new identity correcting voice. This time America’s favorite stock trading infant looses his entire life savings by investing in credit default swaps. Too bad he’s not a huge corporate bank or he might have been bailed out by Uncle Sam. There are dozens of E-trade baby remixes and memes out there but few use the ads subversively to comment on the market or economic crisis.
As I hit publish on this post I noticed that the fair use remix had just been removed from YouTube due to a bogus copyright claim by E-trade Financial. Unfortunately, it’s common practice for corporations to abuse the video takedowns in an attempt to stifle criticism, parody or commentary around their brands. Interestingly, it seems E-trade has not gone after the version on College Humor’s own website, perhaps because it would require real legal action instead of YouTube’s easy-to-abuse automatic takedown system of doom. Luckily, I had downloaded a copy of the remix yesterday and have now re-uploaded to YouTube with a fair use notice attached.
