DMCA Shuts Down Fansite Run By Preschool Teacher

Image via Wikipedia

On of the many super-cool niches out there on the web is the world of “fanedits.”

As defined by TorrentFreak:

“Taking famous movies as a base, faneditors spend huge amounts of time editing with sophisticated software in order to create improved or just plain different versions of existing movies. Most of the time, faneditors try to improve what is wrong or bad with a movie, using advanced techniques to create a new piece of art based on the original. Of course, faneditors love to share their work with others in the community, something the movie industry wants to bring to an end.”

Now comes word that one of the most popular sites for fans to share their edits is being shut down due to DMCA takedown requests.

Not only is it yet another absurd example of the major motion picture studios attacking the core fans they rely on for ticket sales, but, in this case, it exposed one of the horrible pirates they are trying to stop.

“I am boon23, faneditor and administrator of the biggest fanedits website in the world. I’m a preschool teacher from Europe and as faneditor I post under the name CBB (created by boon) and have so far created 29 fanedits, which is quite a lot. It is my hobby, my art, the thing I really love to do and will continue to do.”

Yup.  A preschool teacher.  Nice work, guys.  Go get ‘em!

Abuse of DMCA for Use of YMCA

There is an article over on TechDirt that just makes me shake my head sadly:

“Scorpio Music sent a letter to Yahoo (presumably a DMCA notice) that stated that a video created by Loren Feldman infringed on copyrighted material they control. The alleged infringement is over the use of the YMCA song by the Villiage People.

The video doesn’t play the song. At one point, for a couple of seconds, the puppets sang one line of it (around the 1:30 mark). Yahoo removed the video immediately (it’s still up at YouTube and is embedded above), and sent an email to Feldman threatening to terminate his account.”

The issues surrounding copyright and fair use are probably THE key issue as the internet becomes fully ingrained into society.  I don’t see how the artists on either side of the debate benefit from this sort of behavior.

Lawyers win again.

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