Warner Music Group Silences a Legend (and some guys named Hall & Oates)
July 15, 2009
Filed Under: in News, Social Media, Tech Policy
Author: Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins
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If you haven’t heard today, Warner Music Group has apparently pulled the audio out of the infamous cat that’s shown up in every uncomfortable Youtube moment for the last several years.
It’s unfortunate, since it’s proven to be objectively funny, and incidentally exposed a whole generation of listeners to the music of Hall & Oates.
CNet’s Caroline McCarthy has the story:
Citing copyright concerns, YouTube has deleted the audio from a hosted video that depicts the Internet meme "Keyboard Cat" showing up in a vintage TV after-school special and then embedded in the foreground of the '80s-era music video for the song "You Make My Dreams" by pop duo Daryl Hall and John Oates. It was an extremely awesome match, because the musical feline fit into the minimalist Hall & Oates video a little too well.
The audio appears to have been deleted on behalf of music label Warner Music Group. "This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG," a message adjacent to the video read. "The audio has been disabled."
The numbers she cites for the video are pretty low (she says 375,000, though I’ve seen versions of the original with over two million views, let alone all the myriad of spinoffs).
I’m eagerly anticipating Mike Masnick’s inevitable opinion over at Techdirt on the topic – I think a solid argument could be made that the Keyboard Cat version of original Hall and Oates song is sufficiently transformative to avoid copyright protection rules as a parody – though I’m not an expert on all aspects of IP law, so I’ll defer to him on that.
Who’s the Villain? Hall? Oates? YouTube? Algorithms? WMG?
There are number of folks who could be responsible for the takedown in this instance, and just about all of the following have been blamed:
- Hall & Oates: they’ve vigorously defended their intellectual property in the past according to several writeups I’ve seen. They may not have been overly pleased by being accompanied by a one trick kitty.
- YouTube’s Algorithm: YouTube has an algorithm that goes out and searches for images and audio samples that match copyrighted works in their database. This can be sufficiently ruled out as the culprit, though, since it only scans the first thirty seconds.
- Warner Music Group: The most likely culprit – they’ve let their licensing deal lapse with YouTube, and have been known to have videos pulled from artists they’re currently repping who’ve uploaded their own music themselves.
The bottom line is that Warner needs to lighten up. I don’t often quote the Encyclopedia Dramatica (documentation source for most things 4chan), but as they say, “Keyboard cat […] will make your fail full of win.”
The whole point of the meme is to take old and uncomfortable moments caught on video and make them relevant and entertaining. How else can you explain the fact that you chuckled during the video above (which has to be one arguably the most uncomfortable moment in tech punditry history).
The only way that WMG could possibly survive the impending death of their company (brought on by clueless acts like this) would be if someone caught them signing the paperwork where they filed for bankruptcy on camera, uploaded it to Youtube, and remixed the keyboard cat to the end.
Until then, it’s just another long line of clueless acts that shows how far out of touch the music industry is.
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I wish everyone would lighten up and realize that You Tube (and other sites, for that matter) exposure helps more than hurts, especially in situations like this where a whole new, and younger, audience might be brought into the fold. I understand the whole rights thing, but as a fan, I just wish everyone would chill out.