On Tuesday, music publisher BMG issued a successful Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown forcing YouTube to remove a campaign ad for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The reason? It included video of President Obama singing a few bars of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.”
There were at least fourteen other copies of that clip on YouTube that had not evoked BMG’s ire, a fact that highlighted how DMCA requests can be used as a political and personal tool, not merely a commercial protection.
But what a difference a day makes: by Wednesday morning, ten of those had been taken down.
Most present one of two messages, either: “This video contains content from BMG_Rights_Management, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds” or “The uploader has not made this video available in your country.”
BMG ignored request for comment for both this and the Daily Dot’s previous story.
Perhaps most interesting is that at least four copies of the clip are still up as of this writing. There doesn’t seem to be any pattern behind which made the cut. Two have barely been watched: 145 and 234 respectively. Another, which has been overlaid with music from Al Green’s original, has been watched 76,000 times, and a fourth, from CNN’s broadcast of the song, has 291,000 views.
Photo via YouTube