Do as I Say, Not as I Do
I apologize for reminding everyone about the horrific election we had here in the states last year, but you may recall that roughly a year ago the people at JibJab made a hoakey video about President Bush and John Kerry set to the tune of "This Land is Your Land" by Woody Guthrie. As you also may recall, Ludlow Music, who owned the copyright for the song, filed a ridiculous lawsuit against JibJab for not obtaining proper permission to use the music. JibJab ended up hiring the wonderful people at the EFF to help defend their right to fair use and argued in their pleading that:
"(Ludlow Music's threats) have jeopardized (JibJab's) First Amendment-protected right to free speech and its right to disseminate that speech via its Internet hosting facilities. (JibJab) therefore seeks a judgment that its artistic expression is protected by the First Amendment and copyright's fair use doctrine, before that expression is silenced by (Ludlow's) threats."
Inexplicably, as noted by the people at the Berkeley Intellectual Property Weblog, it appears that the Jib Jab people have now turned around and sent a cease and desist letter to The Black Lantern for using 9 non-contiguous seconds of the "This Land" video in his mashup of the Legendary KO's "George Bush doesn’t like Black People". To make matters even more surreal, JibJab's lawyers in the case (Goldring, Hertz, Lichtenstein & Haft) like to collect "Bill of Rights" awards from the ACLU in their spare time (clearly these awards only honor amendments 2 through 10).