In early January, Jonathan and I were invited to speak on a panel at  World’s Fair Use Day in Washington, DC to provide the perspective of artists who use copyrighted material in their work. Our panel followed Congressman Mike Doyle’s (D-Penn) keynote address on defending Fair Use against ongoing attacks from corporate media interests. It was also a great opportunity to chat with our friends, Mark Hosler from Negativeland and Dan Walsh from Garfield Minus Garfield.

It was the very end of a long day when we were pleasantly reminded of these two remixes brought to our attention by cultural critic Mark Dery, who coined and popularized the term Culture Jamming:

Scary Mary, created by MovieMker, remixes Mary Poppins into a horror film. It is not overtly political but it is a fun example of how additive text and a new soundtrack can turn the carefully crafted Disney-fied world on it’s head.

It’s Raining Men is a simple yet articulate comment on the prevalence of men (and scantly clad ones at that) in the movie 300. Suburbala paired the film’s footage with the famous song by the same name, queering the gaze of the Trogans and satirizing their hyper-masculinity to reveal the homoerotic subtext of the movie.

For more on the one-day conference hosted by Public Knowledge, check out the web-cast from the First Annual World’s Fair Use Day.

Category: About Remixing
Topic Tags: fair use, government, negativland

Remix artist Diran Lyons, who’s work we have featured on this site before, has just completed an ambitious remix project critical of President Obama’s foreign policy entitled “Jake Gyllenhaal Challenges the Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize”.

The piece is a remixed narrative that combines two Jake Gyllenhall films (Donnie Darko & Jarhead) with news footage of President Barack Obama. As the President wins the Nobel Peace Prize, Gyllenhaal’s character becomes disillusioned with Obama’s increasingly pro-war rhetoric, escalation of the war in Afghanistan and the failure to withdraw troops from Iraq.

After Diran uploaded this video to YouTube is was instantly removed with the following message:

We think this is a particularly hilarious use of the word “decided” considering YouTube runs a fully automated content ID matching system which does automatic takedowns seconds after a video is uploaded AND the remix is a fair use of any NBC content making it totally legal.

Diran went through YouTube’s online “dispute” process and after a few hours got his video back online. However NBC Universal may still decide to have it removed again via a DMCA takedown notice. We hope this remix stays put, as it is clearly a fair use of any NBC material, but as we all know, just because a video is a fair use does not mean it will stay on the internet. Take a look at Takedown Hall of Shame.

If something similar has happened to your remix video the Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF) has put together a fantastic Guide to YouTube Removals which will tell you everything you need to know about getting your video back online.

Category: short film
Topic Tags: hollywood, obama, peace, presidency, violence, war

This remixed trailer re-envisions the 1990 romantic comedy film “Pretty Woman”. The original movie stars Richard Gere as a wealthy businessman and Julia Roberts as women who prostitutes herself on the streets of New York City. The original film was supposed to be a dark drama dealing with the difficult lives of sex workers but was rewritten into a Cinderella-type romantic comedy prior to production.

“Pretty Woman” reinforced and glamorized a myth that prostitution is a way to find a wealthy husband, a myth that conveniently conceals the harsh realities of sex work on the street. It also hinds the fact that woman often enter the sex trade as a way to economically support themselves when few other options are available.

Here, FunkyBeccaBecca re-edits the movie trailer re-imagining it in a more appropriate genre, horror. She adds a new soundtrack and with it re-frames Richard Gere’s character transforming him from “wealthy savor” to violent controlling predator.

Category: movie trailer
Topic Tags: gender, hollywood, sexism, sexuality

Public Knowledge has just released their new series of four video interviews called “We Are Creators Too” that focuses on artists who push the boundaries of copyright law. First to be featured was Nina Paley whose Sita Sings the Blues feature film (set to music from the Public Domain) reveals the timelessness of an old Indian folk tale while simultaneously exposing the archaic nature of copyright. Francesca Coppa, fan, academic and keeper of women’s vidding herstory is also featured along with Jonathan and myself.

Public Knowledge is a great resource for remix artists and vidders because they acknowledge that Fair Use is a right, not a privilege. As artist, we can only continue making new work with the hopes that the product and process decreases copyright confusion and encourages the use of new media technologies to sustain media literacy and critical thinking about popular, and proprietary, culture.

Part 4 – Francesca Coppa

Part 3 – Jonathan McIntosh

Part 2 – Elisa Kreisinger

Part 1 – Nina Paley

Category: About Remixing
Topic Tags: activism, copyright, corporations, fair use, REMOVED, rights, television, vidding

Why it Takes Three Weeks to Post Your Youtube Video

In the year 2009, copyright disputes have been taken over by robots.

On July 21^st I posted a remix video to Youtube called “Super Pork and Beans All-Stars.” It was a remixed version of Weezer’s popular Pork and Beans music video, which is owned by Universal Music Group (UMG) – my version was made of new footage that I manipulated to match the song.

Immediately after the upload, Youtube’s copyright bots recognized the UMG song on my soundtrack and disabled my video. Youtube has a built-in online tool for copyright disputes, so I used that to tell them that my work was fair use and should not have been removed. My movie was put back online right away,  but the dispute process wasn’t over.

YouTube forwarded my dispute to UMG and I was surprised to find out that UMG replied back only a day later. They told Youtube that they owned the song and that I was not allowed to use it without permission. Such a quick response from UMG makes me suspect they’re using more bots to respond automatically to Youtube’s built-in disputes. After UMG’s response, my movie was automatically taken down once again.

Luckily for me I had already learned how to deal with this from Owen Gallagher, who runs totalrecut.com and has successfully fought other Youtube takedowns. On July 23^rd, I followed Owen’s example and sent Youtube a DMCA counter-notice. These counter-notices need to be formatted in a specific way to be considered legitimate, otherwise it’s at Youtube’s discretion whether or not they ignore you. You can find a guide to how the DMCA counter-notices work at Chillingeffects.org.

I was finally notified that my video was going back online on August 12^th — around 21 days after my original posting. A big chunk of that was spent waiting for UMG to meet their DMCA-imposed deadline to seek legal action against me if they found my video to be infringing. Thankfully, nobody has yet invented a bot that can take you to court, so the deadline lapsed and my video back went online, hopefully for good.

In the year 2010, copyright disputes should be handled by people.

So I got a happy ending, but imagine if I was a career artist who wanted to dedicate more time to creating than to looking up copyright law and counter-notice procedures. Or imagine I had kids, or school, or any number of things that might be more important to me than being a copyright geek. How willing would I be to dig through Youtube’s site to find the automated dispute process? And once that automated dispute got rejected, how willing would I be to research the precise criteria required to send my counter-notice in a format that Youtube couldn’t ignore? And if I had to do this for multiple videos, and wait three weeks per submission, who could blame me for concluding that Youtube just wasn’t the place to reliably distribute my work?

Youtube is actually one of the more obliging sites for providing tools and instructions on how to exercise your fair use rights, but even there it’s a small research project for any user who may want to fight back. Meanwhile major labels aren’t even bothering to hire staff to make sure they’re not taking down legal videos. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has sued other content companies for abusing copyright in this way, but that has not been enough to deter the massive automated takedowns.

Others have already proposed an important step toward fixing this problem: replace the current “notice-and-takedown” laws with “notice-and-notice” ones. If UMG wants to take people’s videos down, users should have a chance to dispute it  before the content is removed. There should be no pressure on service providers to take down legal content. This ought to be a minimum, uncontroversial step, even if we put aside other legitimate arguments for expanding fair use and reducing copyright terms. Internet users should not have to fight uphill battles to keep legal videos online just so a handful of labels can save on staffing costs.

[This is a guest post for PRV by video remixer IKAT381]

Category: articles
Topic Tags: copyright, corporations, fair use

This remix by freeyourpixels is a short yet eloquent critique of the US Marines “Red Stripe” online ad campaign. The remix uses still images and TV commercial clips for source materials and implements additive text and precise match-on-action editing techniques to unite them. The red stripe transitions the viewer from one clip to next and was created using After Effects. It’s a brilliant, yet simple, visual motif which echos the brutal imperialist history of the US Marines. The Scarlet Stripe, said to commemorate the bloodshed by US Marine officers during the 1846 Battle of Chapultepec in Mexico, is more often referred to as the Blood Stripe.

Category: tv commercial
Topic Tags: capitalism, corporations, government, iraq, marines, military, terrorism, violence, war

Please note this vid deals with issues of rape and consent. More specifically, it’s a playful yet critical look at the troubling presentation of these issues in the Fox television show “Dollhouse”. Because these topics are intense, we feel viewers should  be aware of the content before viewing.

The vid is fittingly titled “It Depends on What You Pay” by vidder Gianduja Kiss who expertly combines clips from the first season of Joss Whedon’s new television show “Dollhouse” with music from the 1960′s off-Broadway musical “The Fantasticks”.

For those unfamiliar with the premise of the show, it’s set inside a secretive corporation called the Dollhouse. People are coerced into handing over their bodies to the Dollhouse which then rents out those bodies for profit. The “actives” or “dolls” have their minds wiped and are then re-programed with the personalities and skills desired by each new “client”.

Gianduja Kiss’s vid brilliantly exposes the fact that these “dolls” have no way to consent to any of their “engagements” – sexual or otherwise – an issue the show ignores. The vid names this disturbing lack of consent for what it is – rape. This calling out of the show’s narrative is an important step in countering the current rape culture and its place in our culture of violence.

Here is the original vid post on dreamwidth where you can get a hi-res version.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video.

For more on these issues and “Dollhouse” check out this post on The Angry Black Woman “The problem with Dollhouse is not that I don’t understand subtlety” and this one on Feminist SF “Working in the Dollhouse” as well as Gianduja Kiss’s insightful posts on the topic.

In closing we would like to echo a recent tweet on the  Feminist Frequency blog about “Dollhouse” that links to Joss Whedon’s inspiring 2006 Equality Now speech and reads:

Dear Joss, you should rewatch this video because I think you may have forgotten your principles, you might learn something from yourself. Love, Anita http://bit.ly/lBvP3

Category: vidding
Topic Tags: gender, sexism, television, vidding, violence