This week's viral videos are disappearing from YouTube right and left -- politically speaking, that is. First came Monday's copyright-inspired "takedown" of "Burning Down The House," a report that casts blame for the current housing crisis on the policies of liberals. Then today, a liberal user apparently had second thoughts about her "Sing For Obama Change" video after being subjected to attacks at YouTube and across the Web. Both videos are back online now, but it sure has been a wacky week at YouTube. Law professor Lawrence Lessig said it shouldn't have been so wacky on the copyright front. An advocate of broader "fair use" of copyrighted content, he uploaded to his blog the original "Burning Down The House" video that YouTube refused to host after complaints by Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group. Lessig is a technology policy adviser to Barack Obama, one of the politicians the video criticizes, and he disagrees with the message of the video. But Lessig defended the creator's right to use the background music to buttress his points. "Music is attached to parts of the video to give it a special boost in social meaning, or significance," he said. "The cultural reference enhances the political. It becomes part of the story. ... This is an amateur remix of popular culture. It should be completely exempt from copyright restrictions." The wackiness over the "Sing For Obama Change" video is another story. What started as a legitimate debate about the merits of parents letting their children be used for political purposes deteriorated into a sometimes mean-spirited online feeding frenzy. I found the video after seeing a blurb about it at PrezVid, a nonpartisan site that analyzes the use of online video in the presidential campaign. The unusually harsh critique caught my attention: "Creepy California parents make their cute kids spend a beautiful Sunday afternoon singing a song for Barack Obama." I embedded the video on Eyeblast.tv last night and reprinted the critique, with a link to PrezVid. The Drudge Report also called out the video, which quickly climbed to the top of Viral Video Chart for the day. More than 300 blogs have linked to the video so far. The hostile reaction, including a string of pointed comments at YouTube, prompted creator Kathy Sawada to make the video "private." A blogger on the Obama campaign's community page also deleted a post about the video (cached copy here) and the link to it. Those decisions led to a new series of attacks against Sawada, whose e-mail was included on the Obama community page. She eventually restored the video and just disabled the comments section at YouTube. All but five of the comments, three of which are Sawada's defense of the video, have been deleted. On the off chance that she removes the video again, I downloaded it to my computer and repackaged excerpts for Eyeblast. I don't want to test the boundaries of "fair use" by reposting the entire video, but the excerpts are fair game for purposes of commentary. If the video disappears again, you can get the gist of it here.
