Taking Down the Shred

| 0 Comments

Wired: Humorless Metalheads Shut Down Popular YouTuber: "The three unnamed artists filed copyright infringement claims against the parody videos of Finnish media artist Santeri Ojala, causing YouTube to shut down his account over the weekend.… Ojala's popular videos poked harmless fun at famous guitar soloists by dubbing his own abhorrently bad strummings over rock concert footage."

The "shreds" videos live again on at MySpace (until they receive a takedown notice) and at Wired.

Eric Clapton shreds

Since the videos comment on the seriousness of virtuostic guitar wanking, there is a non-trivial argument that these could be considered a parody fair use. Of course, there is also a non-trvial argument that these videos are defamatory and damaging to the guitarists' reputations, even though they are public figures. But from that perspective, striking these videos down off one video hosting service may perpetuate them across the web becoming more powerful than imaginable.

Leave a comment

About

A work in progress

Recent Entries

The best fan video in the world?
Via Top Gear's blog, I found this link to a fan-made Top Gear style search for the beat driving road…
Shatner, Montalban, iPod and Kindle
Dvice tests out the range of expression in the text-to-speech systems in the Kindle 2 and iPod Shuffle by having…
A F#*&ing brilliant Supreme Court ruling?
The Supreme Court released its ruling in FCC v. Fox Television Stations, et al. (07-582), in which a 5-4 majority…