All of You At BlogHer Should Go to A Hearing in Silicon Valley Today

Who doesn't love adorable kid videos?  Wouldn't you post a video of your toddler dancing with music in the background?  Especially if it was to Prince?

Maybe not such a good idea, at least if the music is owned by Universal Music Publishing Group.

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will argue in Federal Court today in San Jose (close to BlogHer, I'm not there, sob) to protect the free speech and fair use rights of mother who posted a 29 second home movie of her son dancing to Prince on YouTube.  The song "Let's Go Crazy" can be heard in the background of the video. 

Universal had the video yanked and sent a copyright threat to the mom.  Eff Claims it is "bogus."

EFF represents Stephanie Lenz, who uploaded a 29-second clip of her son dancing in the family kitchen to the Prince song, "Let's Go Crazy," which is playing on a stereo in the background. Remarkably, Universal Music Publishing Group claimed that the video infringed its copyrights, and had the video yanked from YouTube. Lenz's lawsuit against Universal seeks to hold the company accountable for misrepresenting that her fair use violated its copyrights.

I so hope she wins.  29 seconds of a song in the background?  What the hell is the matter with people?

source, source
 

Comments

[cindy w]

Man, I hope Universal doesn't also represent Destiny's Child, because... uh, there might possibly be a video on YouTube of me at 8 1/2 months pregnant dancing in my kitchen to "Bootylicious." Maybe.

[Miss Britt]

Shit. Tomorrow's post was supposed to be a video of me singing along to THAT EXACT SONG in the car.

I'm not even kidding.

Crap.

[JZMom]

Okay, in the interest of full disclosure, my husband and I are HUGE Prince fans. We have pretty much every CD ever made by the glorious man - "Holy River" was what we played as we left for the hospital when I was about to be induced with our first child.

That said...
1. How many people have really seen the video?
2. How many people hopped onto iTunes after watching the video, saying, "Man, I forgot how awesome that song is. I've gotta have it!"
3. Here's my bias, but how many people DON'T already have like 5 copies of that song?????

[[mark]]

(found article linked by one kdiddy. i hope it's okay that those of us sans-ovaries comment here...y'all are some cool mamas.)

prince's crusade to remove any and all unauthorized use of his copyrighted material from the internets in any shape or form has been well documented over the last year-or-so.

his m.o. has been pretty slash-and-burn, including targeting fairly elaborate fan sites (to which the owners had spent many hours and provided lots of publicity for his newer, less-publicized works) for posting lyrics transcriptions, pictures from magazines, and guitar tabs.

personally, i don't understand it. it's one thing to go after the company that owns your master recordings and won't give them up. it's an entirely different thing to target fans of your music for the mere act of referencing your music...seems fairly counter-intuitive.