Of Memes and Media Takedowns

As a recent contributor to the “Hitler meme” genre of detourned video parodies of the movie Downfall, I was inspired by the recent Rocketboom video with Kenyatta Cheese describing the steps to challenge a YouTube takedown. Rocketboom, in turn, was motivated by the recent wave of takedowns ordered by Downfall producers, Constantin Films, which resulted in the removal of hundreds of Downfall parodies, mine included.

My Hitler meme video Digital Humanities and the Case for Critical Commons was created to publicize the relaunch of Critical Commons, a site that promotes the fair use of media by educators. I was contacted by Alison Hanold of the Center for Social Media at American University, who was writing an article about YouTube’s takedowns of the Hitler videos and she generously included my my thoughts about the Downfall takedowns:

I found the latest round of Downfall takedowns to be unfortunate and poorly timed on the part of Constantin Films, which is now being subjected to disproportionate resentment and vilification. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be criticized, but there are many other much worse offenders among the copyright industries’ takedown trolls and it’s toward them that our real outrage should be directed. The shock-and-awe strategies that have been favored by members of the MPAA and RIAA for the past decade have had an impact on some people’s behavior and it has instilled fear and paranoia in many others. But, like military shock-and-awe campaigns, it’s short-sighted and ultimately counter-productive. The longer-term impact of such mass takedowns is organized resistance and legal efforts that will ultimately have a greater cost to the media industries than a mere public relations nightmare. Creators, students, educators, vidders (etc.) have unprecedented resources and support at their disposal in the form of the CSM’s Best Practices guides and a growing body of court decisions supporting fair use. Indiscriminate takedowns that ignore the legitimate protections of fair use are just as illegal as commercial piracy and it’s time for the industries to start being held accountable for their actions.

In retrospect, I think the real issue here is not the actions of Constantin Films, a relatively small player who has been swept into the current copyright wars, but the resulting wave of awareness about YouTube’s use of automated takedown systems, including ContentID, which was used by Constantin to order the Downfall takedowns. Of course, none of this is intelligible outside the context of the current Viacom v. YouTube litigation, which could significantly undermine current interpretations of the DMCA safe harbor clause that made YouTube a billion-dollar company and made online video a key part of the cultural vernacular for millions of creators. While automated takedowns and “fingerprinting” systems that sniff for copyrighted content while a file is being uploaded may have once seemed like the silver bullet to fight unauthorized uses of copyrighted materials, such systems are incapable of making nuanced determinations about the fairness of a given use. It will be no small irony if these automated measures, intended to deter and intimidate even legitimate users, turns out to be the “downfall” of the copyright industries’ last-ditch efforts to hold onto a fading business model.

IKEA as ARG project at HASTAC conference

On Friday April 16 as part of the HASTAC Grand Challenges and Global Innovations virtual conference, I will be “presenting” (live via pre-recorded video) a project from my class last semester titled “Interactive Experience and World Design: IKEA as ARG” in which graduate students from USC’s Interactive Media program infiltrated an IKEA retail outlet to analyze the spatial and narrative design of the store as part of an Alternate Reality Game experience. The video offers a summary of the course context and project assignment, focusing on the concept of “scripted spaces,” drawn from Norman Klein’s book The Vatican to Vegas. This video also marks the first time I have had content automatically removed from my YouTube account due to the inclusion of copyrighted material. In representing the transmedia context for this project, the video includes clips of television programs, feature films, advertisements and popular music, at least one of which was flagged by YouTube’s copyright-filtering system on behalf of the Fox/News Corp. media conglomerate. I have filed a counter-takedown notice with YouTube in the hopes of having the video reinstated for public viewing, but for now, it is viewable as a Quicktime file or on Vimeo.

H5’s Logorama: Best Animated Trademark Dilution

The French design firm H5 has been responsible for some of the most remarkable graphics-oriented music videos and short films of the past decade and their Logorama, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film is no exception. In order to be eligible for the Oscar, Logorama screened briefly in Los Angeles last December as part of the Flux festival and I read about it for the first time on Holly Willis’ Blur+Sharpen blog on KCET. Since fair use does not apply to trademark appropriation, it was hard to imagine how H5 got away with trashing literally hundreds of icons of Euro-American consumer culture. The answer lies in trademark law’s relatively narrow concern with brand identification and prevention of confusion among consumers. Ironically, the very audacity of H5’s appropriation would seem to ensure that no reasonable consumer could believe that Logorama’s profane, hyperviolent Ronald McDonald was associated in any way with the McDonald’s corporation. Sadly, both H5’s website and the Logorama site include only the opening sequence of the film (less than two minutes of the complete 16 minute short), accompanied by a perky, nostalgic Dean Martin crooning “Good Morning Life” which belies the shooting, earthquakes and general destruction that ensue.