Monday, October 29, 2007

Who's Gone Crazy Here?

You may have heard that Musical Artist Prince has been on a mission to remove his copywritten music off of Social Networking Sites such as MySpace and YouTube. We learned this weekend of a case however in which a women named Stephanie Lenz received an email from YouTube telling her that the video she had on her YouTube account had been taken down due to copywrite infringement. The video featured her 18 month young baby boy playing and dancing to the Prince Song "Let's Go Crazy."

The "Crazy" thing about this is that the music is on in the background and the total running time for the video is about 29 seconds. The song can barely be heard but the name of the YouTube post "Lets Go Crazy" is certainly what caught the attention of Prince and the Universal Music Publishing Group who demanded the video be removed. According to ABC News, Ms Lenz was advised to refrain from further copywrite violations or she would have her account deleted. At the time the video was taken down she only had recieved about 28 views from mostly friends and family.

After transistioning from fear of the music group to anger, she contacted the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is suing the Music group citing abuse of the DMCA. YouTube restored the video after a filing with them from Ms Lenz. It was my belief in film school that music in the background of a scene could be legally heard, the DMCA may have changed all of that? we'll have to wait and see how this one plays out.

Read the Full ABC News Story
http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=3777651&page=1

See the YouTube Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1KfJHFWlhQ

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