Oct 8th, 2008 at 9:12 am
Meta “Take on Me”
Via Jason Kottke, the classic video for A-Ha’s “Take On me” (the video’s a classic, the song merely okay) with the lyrics changed to reflect a literal narration of the events depicted in the video:
Very cool. It’s too bad that under current copyright law there’s a good argument that it’s illegal to make or distribute this video. A more sensible system would recognize that there’s real value in letting people play with this kind of idea.
53 Responses to “Meta “Take on Me””
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October 8th, 2008 at 9:31 am
hilarious.
if you liked that, you might also like this…
October 8th, 2008 at 9:35 am
Family Guy’s A-Ha parody was better.
And, of course, they compensated the royalty holders for the use of their intellectual property, something Matthew bizarrely finds to be wrong.
—–
Frankly, I’d like to see Matthew put his money where his mouth is. Return his advance and any other moneys received from his book to the publisher, and put the book on the internet for free.
After all, if he’s against artists being compensated for the intellectual property they create, he can take the first step.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:43 am
Petey, as I understand it, Matt’s position is not that creators should give away their work for free, but that royalty structures be reformed so that people who want to make things like this can compensate the copyright holders more easily without negotiating the mess of lawyers, keeping track of which combination of rightsholders to pay, etc.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:46 am
Family Guy’s A-Ha parody was better.
It’s impressive how Petey manages to be wrong on nearly everything.
And, of course, they compensated the royalty holders for the use of their intellectual property, something Matthew bizarrely finds to be wrong.
Great for Seth McFarlane, who has that kind of money. Not so great for amateur video makers and other starving artist-types who can’t afford to pay for royalties.
if he’s against artists being compensated for the intellectual property they create
Nice strawman, Petey.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:48 am
I dunno–I’m no expert on copyright law, but since they are parodying the video itself, it seems like a clearcut “Pretty Woman”/”Food Chain Barbie” case and therefore protected under the Fair Use doctrine.
The real problem is that you don’t actually need a good argument to get pretty far in court, because this is all done on a case-by-case basis. In other words, you more need a procedural fix than a substantive fix in this sort of case.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:48 am
the song merely okay
You take that back.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:49 am
“It’s too bad that under current copyright law there’s a good argument that it’s illegal to make or distribute this video.”
Also worth noting that it’s not de facto illegal “to make or distribute this video”.
What would be de facto illegal is if you tried to make money off of it without compensating the rights holders. That seems just about perfectly correct to me.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:50 am
heh. this is what i was trying to link to: DaVinci’s Notebook.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:51 am
By the way, it is indeed impressive that this seems to be yet another area in which Petey has no clue what he is talking about. He seems blissfully unaware of Fair Use doctrine in general, let alone the specific fact that parodies are considered a legitimate purpose under Fair Use doctrine.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:54 am
Family Guy’s A-Ha parody was better.
It’s not actually a parody, and seldom clever or funny, if all you do is cut-and-paste the thing you’re referring to into a different context. I realize this point is absolutely lost on fans of Family Guy.
On a more positive note, I thought the new-lyrics “Take On Me” video was hilarious.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:54 am
“I’m gonna kick some ass with my own pipe wrench.”
That made my morning, but I can’t agree with you on the IP issues: it’s clearly over the line. The Internet creates a kind of samizdat culture where we can enjoy this stuff, but I don’t think you can really argue that wholesale appropriation of the video and music can count as “fair use.”
Now, the fact that Disney keeps buying off Congress so that nothing will enter the public domain ever again–THAT is a problem. Artists should enjoy protection of their works for a reasonable, fixed and finite period of time.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:59 am
Hey Petey, where do you find that Matthew is “against artists being compensated for the intellectual property they create”?
Can you not read what Matthew has posted? Matthew does not describe what his “more sensible system” is and I do not know his personal opinion on the matter. You are assuming Matthew’s is a system with no compensation to the original artist. We could just as easily assume he meant that the law should impose reasonable royalties (i.e. affordable rates) to allow and encourage other artists to create derivative works. Instead of this goal, the current copyright law stifles creativity of new derivative works.
I have issues with copyright law because I am a cancer researcher and if I create a cure for cancer, I can only protect that Intellectual Property for 20 years with a patent; but an artist who creates a video or takes a picture has 70+ years of copyright protection.
I am not asking for 70 years of protection for my patents, I submit that the copyright time length is much too long. I see no reason that copyrights should not also be 20 years, as they are in no way more valuable than a cure for cancer.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:00 am
“Nice strawman, Petey.”
I fail to see how that’s a strawman. If you’re against artists being compensated for their intellectual property, you’re against artists being compensated for their intellectual property.
It’s really not that complex.
Artists made that thing. It didn’t just appear. And those artists depend on it not being in the public domain for a period of time in order to be compensated for their work.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Wonderful song, wonderful video, wonderful parody. I don’t care about the royalties.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:03 am
DTM,
You can’t just call anything a “parody” and make intellectual property disappear. For instance, I can’t make a legitimate parody of Star Wars by showing the entire movie up to the last frame, and then replacing the last scene with a big pie fight.
A parody still has to be a substantially original work of art (like, say, the film “Hardware Wars” was), and I don’t think you’d ever get away with using the entire video (and, as far as I could tell, the actual intrumental track) from “Take on Me” in any court of law. You want to make a legal parody of that video, you go get a rotoscope machine and a synthesizer and get to work.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:04 am
It’s a strawman because he’s not against artists being compensated for their intellectual property, dumbass.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:05 am
but I don’t think you can really argue that wholesale appropriation of the video and music can count as “fair use.”
Why not? As I understand it, parodies are allowed to borrow as much from the original as they need to make the intended parody work. The nature of this parody is to make fun of the scenes in the video, so they need to borrow the whole video.
In other words, as I understand it the limit on parody borrowing is that all the borrowing has to be in the service of the parody, and not such that they are trying to replace the original in the marketplace. But I think the makers of this parody were quite clever in that they threaded the new material consistently through the whole video, even the parts which originally had no words. Again, I’m no expert, but that seems sufficient to make sure the whole thing counts as part of the parody.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:07 am
“I submit that the copyright time length is much too long. I see no reason that copyrights should not also be 20 years”
I think the ‘98 law extending audio/visual copyrights to an almost indefinite period was an abortion.
But I don’t think that somewhere around 30 to 50 years for audio/visual stuff is unreasonable. (That would still be less than was the case before the ‘98 law.) I don’t see why that A-Ha video should be in the public domain yet. Let them have at least a generation to profit from it before it goes public.
And FWIW, it makes sense that medical stuff would come off patent earlier than artistic work, given the larger stakes to the public interest.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:09 am
“It’s a strawman because he’s not against artists being compensated for their intellectual property, dumbass.”
I don’t think you have a clue as to what is being discussed, dumbass.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Craig,
First, I think I already dealt with your Star Wars hypo. That might indeed be deemed an infringement, but the precise problem would be that all the borrowing without alteration prior to the final scene could be deemed outside the purpose of the parody. But the better analogy would be something like taking the entire Star Wars movie and then replacing all the dialogue with something funny. And I don’t think it is clear that wouldn’t be fair use.
Second, from where are you getting the proposition “A parody still has to be a substantially original work of art”? As I understand it, a parody has to be sufficiently “transformative” such that it won’t substitute for the original in the marketplace, so you do have to add enough to make it a recognizably different work. But you can in fact borrow directly from the original without recreating the borrowed elements (e.g., the artist used real Barbies in Food Chain Barbie). So I don’t think you are correct that you would have to recreate the elements of a video you were making fun of.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:20 am
“But the better analogy would be something like taking the entire Star Wars movie and then replacing all the dialogue with something funny. And I don’t think it is clear that wouldn’t be fair use.”
I’m not an IP lawyer, but if you kept the original video and just replaced the sound, I’m pretty damn sure you couldn’t sell that legally.
For example, MST3K used obscure movies because it would’ve been far too expensive to use well known movies…
October 8th, 2008 at 10:28 am
I’m not an IP lawyer
Petey, you’re not an expert on anything, and yet your entire shtick consists of pompously lecturing other people as if you were.
if you kept the original video and just replaced the sound, I’m pretty damn sure you couldn’t sell that legally
What’s being sold here? The A-ha parody in question is being distributed for free. Get your head out of your ass and admit, for once, that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:34 am
“What’s being sold here? The A-ha parody in question is being distributed for free.”
And that’s why no one is prosecuting Matthew for helping to distribute it or prosecuting the parody’s creators for mashing it up.
You can do enormous amounts of stuff with other people’s IP as long as you’re not profiting.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:39 am
(1) Thank you so much, cleek @1 and 8.
(2) I think Peetey actually understates the case. Matt’s comment that It’s too bad that under current copyright law there’s a good argument that it’s illegal to make or distribute this video can only properly be taken to show that he is actually a libertarian. I think the data are too sparse to argue that he’s actually a Market Anarchist, though his comments on labor, if not purely motivated by finances, might be taken to suggest that he’s flirting with Anarcho-syndicalism.
Now, let’s please return to the original topic, which was Northern European music videos of the ’80s.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:41 am
“And FWIW, it makes sense that medical stuff would come off patent earlier than artistic work, given the larger stakes to the public interest.”
This is exactly my point, why are we rewarding something that has less public value and interest with more protection?
The first patent and copyright protections, passed in 1790, were for the same time period of 14 years. This has drastically changed since 1976, if not before, when the publishing lobbyists were able to get Congress to change the law to give copyright holders an unconscionable length of time for protection. Unfortunately, at the time the latest copyrights were extended in 1998, 1976, 1909, etc., there were no organizations or lobbyists representing the interests of the public.
See “Rhetoric and Reality in Copyright Law,” Michigan Law Review 94 (1996). Also see “Copyfights: The Future of Intellectual Property in the Information Age”, Cato Institute,
2002.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:42 am
I’m not an IP lawyer, but if you kept the original video and just replaced the sound, I’m pretty damn sure you couldn’t sell that legally.
Again, why not? To repeat, as I understand it the law of fair use and parodies is that you can borrow what you need from the original for the purpose of the parody. In this case, they are actually parodying the video itself the whole way through, so I don’t see why they can’t borrow the whole video. Same thing with a movie–as long as you were constantly parodying the movie itself (making fun of the Star Wars movie itself), I don’t see why you couldn’t borrow all the visuals.
By the way, here is a bit from the Food Chain Barbie opinion in the Ninth Circuit, quoting in turn the Pretty Woman opinion from the Supreme Court (Campbell):
So again, as I understand it you can borrow to the extent it is necessary for the parody, provided you transform it enough that it wouldn’t act as a market substitute. And again it seems to me that taking the video but consistently making fun of it with substituted lyrics fits that standard.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:48 am
By the way, the parody cases also make it clear that you can make a parody with the intent to profit. Again, the basic standard is not that you can’t profit, but rather that you have to be sufficiently transforming the original such that the new work isn’t a market substitute for the original.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:49 am
“So again, as I understand it you can borrow to the extent it is necessary for the parody, provided you transform it enough that it wouldn’t act as a market substitute. And again it seems to me that taking the video but consistently making fun of it with substituted lyrics fits that standard.”
Think of it the other way around.
If I made a movie and threw in a Beatles song without paying for it, and then tried to argue that the context of the movie’s scene where the song played was transforming the song enough that it wasn’t a market substitute, I’d be laughed out of court.
And that’s because the Beatles’ audio recording is copyrighted, just as the visual recording of Star Wars™ is copyrighted. Make sense?
October 8th, 2008 at 10:52 am
I always thought the Ah-Ha video makers stole the idea for the last scene from William Hurt’s Altered States. It’s when the Euro dude is slamming himself into the walls of the hallway, and then when on the floor finally turns real/non-drawing and smiles.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:58 am
If I made a movie and threw in a Beatles song without paying for it, and then tried to argue that the context of the movie’s scene where the song played was transforming the song enough that it wasn’t a market substitute, I’d be laughed out of court.
How is this a parody case?
To make this even remotely relevant, your “other way around” analogy would have to be something like this: you take a musical sequence from the movie Yellow Submarine, keep the music the same, but change the animation, with the new animation clearly making fun of the music.
And that sounds like fair use to me.
October 8th, 2008 at 11:02 am
“How is this a parody case?”
What if I dressed up actors to look like the Beatles while I played the song in my movie? That’d be parody, but I still couldn’t use the song for free if I was profiting off of my movie.
October 8th, 2008 at 11:18 am
What if I dressed up actors to look like the Beatles while I played the song in my movie? That’d be parody, but I still couldn’t use the song for free if I was profiting off of my movie.
Again, why not? If the visuals are actually making fun of the song (so far what you describe sounds lame, but I will give the benefit of the doubt and assume you come up with visuals that are legitimately making fun of the song), then I think your use of the song would be fair use.
But I suspect what you are doing is just trying to avoid the real issue. What you are reaching for is a sham case, where your purpose would not actually be to make fun of the music, but instead you would be trying to do the minimum you need to use the music to promote the nonparody aspects of your film, and hopefully get away with it.
The thing is, the actual case at hand clearly isn’t a sham case: the whole purpose of this work is to make fun of the original video. And so it isn’t helpful to come up with hypothetical sham cases–you need to restrict yourself to cases where the whole purpose is in fact to make fun of the borrowed material.
Finally, profiting per se really isn’t an issue as long as the work is clearly a parody. Again from the Food Chain Barbie case, quoting the Pretty Woman case:
October 8th, 2008 at 11:32 am
By the way, it might also be helpful to recall the Puppies case, where a parody claim was not upheld. The artist made a sculpture copying a photograph of a couple holding puppies. He claimed his sculpture was a commentary on the banality of mass culture, but he lost his case precisely because he wasn’t specifically making fun of the original photograph. Here is some relevant language from that case:
Again, I think Petey is trying to work up an analogy to the Puppies case, meaning something which is not really a parody of the original work in question. But once again, the actual video in question clearly is making fun of the original itself.
October 8th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
It seems to me that an important point is being missed. Petey dismissed Matt’s use of the phrase “de facto illegal” without giving the slightest thought to what Matt meant.
The point is not really whether fair use and copyright laws are fair or over-restrictive. That’s important, obviously, but the problem is that almost any use can be de facto illegal, because the major content providers, who have lots of money can always sue small or independent artists, who have almost none. Even if the suit has dubious merit, defending it can be too expensive a proposition.
October 8th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Matt didn’t actually say “de facto illegal.” He said “there’s a good argument that it’s illegal to make or distribute this video” Which just supports your point, tomemos. Because fair use works only as a defense, it’s very likely that an accused infringer will just cave and pull down the work when the rightsholder makes the accusation rather than fight. This can be, oddly enough, more true when the accused person is not profiting from the work, since they have no financial incentive (or even financial support) to fight the lawsuit.
October 8th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Keeping with the Promise Ring references, here’s Cap’n Jazz doing a cover of “Take on Me”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5_xUlC3f_k
October 8th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
I’m from the 80’s so I’ve watched the original version of that video about a million times. Interestingly I noticed something this time that I never did before…namely, those losing racers are awfully un-sportsmanlike.
October 8th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Ryan: good point. My error.
October 8th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
tomemos and Ryan,
That, by the way, is exactly why I argued above that the problem is more procedural than substantive. Again I’m no expert in this area, but I’ve long thought what we need is an extremely quick, low-cost, and nonadversarial process whereby a person can get an administrative ruling on a proposed fair use, preferably before publication. You may still have to let the rightsholder appeal and sue for an injunction in court following publication, but a favorable prior administrative ruling could be used to preclude any damages. And that alone should help limit nuisance suits.
October 8th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
“The point is not really whether fair use and copyright laws are fair or over-restrictive. That’s important, obviously, but the problem is that almost any use can be de facto illegal, because the major content providers, who have lots of money can always sue small or independent artists, who have almost none. Even if the suit has dubious merit, defending it can be too expensive a proposition.”
Sure. And I’m kinda fond of the current system.
The rights to the A-Ha video are retained, but people can still fuck around with the audio/visual material on a non-commercial scale.
Seems win-win to me, but I then again, I consider having at least a 22 year copyright period on A/V materials to be a damn good thing…
October 8th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Sure. And I’m kinda fond of the current system. The rights to the A-Ha video are retained, but people can still fuck around with the audio/visual material on a non-commercial scale.
But that isn’t the current system.
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