Even Obama Is A Pirate: BMG Issues New Takedown On Original Obama Singing Al Green Clip
Wow. So earlier today, we wrote about how BMG issued a takedown on the new web-based ad put out by the Romney campaign, which included a brief clip of President Obama singing Al Green's "Let's Stay Together." As we argued, this use seemed to be pretty clearly "fair use." And, of course, it was noteworthy that BMG only seemed to go after the Romney ad, making it pretty clear that this was politically motivated. The original clips of Obama singing Al Green were all over YouTube... and BMG only chose to go after the one used in a Romney commercial. It appears that someone pointed out to BMG's lawyers that this looks really bad, so rather than backing down, BMG has doubled down and issued takedowns to a bunch of the original videos of Obama singing that one line from Al Green. Here's one that shows BMG issued the takedown.
The original one that we linked to was actually from the Associated Press, who -- as a news organization -- has an even stronger fair use claim. But that video is missing as well, though it has a slightly different message on the site now:
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http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120717/13500819733/bmg-doubles-down-issues-takedown-original-clip-obama-singing-al-green.shtml
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