For a while, during my high school years, I had a moderately successful anime parody series (part of what is known as the "abridging" trend on YouTube). Things were going well. I was getting some fun editing and voice-acting practice, and people liked the work I was putting out.
However, four episodes into the series, the original publishers of the show I was parodying decided that I was infringing on their copyright, and registered a complaint with YouTube. This was perfectly fine, as they were well within their rights to be wary when it came to copyrights. Unfortunately, they managed to register complaints with all of my videos but one. Apparently, such a large volume of these requests caused YouTube to simply remove all of my videos.
Here's the annoying part: they stated that I could file a counter-claim, to get my videos put back up. When I went to do so, the part of the site where I would file the claim, as well as my videos, and my user page, were completely off-limits to me. All I was allowed to do was watch this video:
Now, it's bad enough that that is the least funny Happy Tree Friends video, probably ever. But what's worse is the fact that I was mandated to watch it. YouTube would not let me into my own account until I watched the video and answered questions about it.
I would like to draw attention to a very specific piece of the Fair use article we read as part of today's work:
"The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use: 'quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author’s observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied'"
I just thought that would be an interesting thing to share from my experience with copyrights.
On a less obnoxious note, my current favorite sampling artist is a trip-hop artist known as Blockhead. If you've never heard of him, it's okay; he handles a big part of the producing for underground rapper Aesop Rock. If you don't know who that is, it's okay, but here's one of his songs, because you should know him:
Anyway, Blockhead: Blockhead, as I said is a trip-hop artist. The interesting thing about him is that all of the titles from his songs come from the various public domain voice samples he uses in his music. These are often bits of dialogue, with few musical samples. He has a really interesting and eerie kind of sound, which is aided by the ambiguous context of the samples used. Below is one of my favorite songs of his, "Long Walk Home," which is a great example of his eerie tones and a rare case of his musical samplings. It makes me think of lost souls wandering an abandoned purgatory manifested as a foggy city at night. Anyway, without further ado, "Long Walk Home" bu Blockhead:
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