Will Chatham

I got another men­tion in the Media Post News regard­ing my Star Wars On a Banjo video being taken down by YouTube due to a com­plain filed by the Warner Music Group.

“Larry Lessig is not alone,” said Corynne McSh­erry, an attor­ney with the dig­i­tal rights group Elec­tronic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion. “Unfor­tu­nately, this is one of many, many, many exam­ples where obvi­ous fair uses get taken down.”

In case you were won­der­ing, I never did file the com­plaint to get my video back online.  I first con­tacted the EFF because I had seen an arti­cle that they were will­ing to help peo­ple whose con­tent had been taken down.

They didn’t take my case, but referred me to a page of infor­ma­tion about what the ram­i­fi­ca­tions might be should I choose to make the claim to YouTube.  In short, I would be open­ing myself up to get­ting sued directly by Warner Music Group.  Since they have many more lawyers and much more money than I do, I opted out of that plan.

It’s a shame, really, that some­thing that fell squarely under the “par­ody” and “fair use” clauses got yanked off the Inter­net for­ever, and that there is no recourse for the lit­tle guys such as myself.  All I ever did was play the Star Wars them on a banjo, which you would think WMG would like because of the mil­lions of views and pro­poga­tion of the Star Wars leg­end.  It was free pub­lic­ity in a very pos­tivie way for WMG.