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YouTube parody creator Bart Baker says his freedom of speech rights may have been breached when his parody of Lorde's 'Royals' music video was removed on copyright grounds.
Baker's parody of the top performing hit had already reached over a million views, as it lampooned the original song and music video which some have labeled as potentially racist.
But the video's rise was cut short when Lorde's publisher filed a copyright dispute against the video and had it taken down.
Under current copyright law, a parody is protected under fair use. As long as the parody's purpose is to comment on (or criticize) the original, then the use of the original content is perfectly legal. Baker's Royals parody would then seem to fit perfectly within the definition of fair use.
Baker then took to his favorite platform, a YouTube video, to inform his million subscribers of the situation, and asked then to take to Twitter to save his video. He asked users to spread the word about the outrage using the hashtag #SaveBartsLordeParody.
And efforts by fans appears to have worked, as the video has just been reinstated.
This isn't the first time that fair use rights have been set aside or ignored by rights holders, or when false positives are caught by the automated system used to detect potential infringement. An infamous incident from last year had one licensing firm order the removal of a video based on ambient background noises of birds, which the firm says matched an unnamed copyrighted song.
Baker's parody of the top performing hit had already reached over a million views, as it lampooned the original song and music video which some have labeled as potentially racist.
But the video's rise was cut short when Lorde's publisher filed a copyright dispute against the video and had it taken down.
Under current copyright law, a parody is protected under fair use. As long as the parody's purpose is to comment on (or criticize) the original, then the use of the original content is perfectly legal. Baker's Royals parody would then seem to fit perfectly within the definition of fair use.
Baker then took to his favorite platform, a YouTube video, to inform his million subscribers of the situation, and asked then to take to Twitter to save his video. He asked users to spread the word about the outrage using the hashtag #SaveBartsLordeParody.
And efforts by fans appears to have worked, as the video has just been reinstated.
This isn't the first time that fair use rights have been set aside or ignored by rights holders, or when false positives are caught by the automated system used to detect potential infringement. An infamous incident from last year had one licensing firm order the removal of a video based on ambient background noises of birds, which the firm says matched an unnamed copyrighted song.