It has been three and a half years since I first uploaded my remix video “Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed” to YouTube. The work is an example of fair use transformative storytelling which serves as a visual critique of gender roles and representations in modern pop culture vampire media.

Since I published the remix in 2009 it has been viewed over 3 million times on YouTube and fans have translated the subtitles into 30 different languages. It has been featured and written about by the LA Times, Boston Globe, Salon, Slate, Wired, Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly and discussed on NPR radio. It was nominated for a 2010 Webby Award in the best remix/mashup category. The video is used in law school programs, media studies courses and gender studies curricula across the country. The remix also ignited countless online debates over the troubling ways stalking-type behavior is often framed as deeply romantic in movie and television narratives.

This past summer, together with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I even screened the remix for the US Copyright Office at the 2012 hearings on exemptions to the DMCA. Afterward my Buffy vs Edward remix was mentioned by name in the official recommendations by the US Copyright Office (pdf) on exemptions to the DMCA as an example of a transformative noncommercial video work.

“Based on the video evidence presented, the Register is able to conclude that diminished quality likely would impair the criticism and comment contained in noncommercial videos.  For example, the Register is able to perceive that Buffy vs Edward and other noncommercial videos would suffer significantly because of blurring and the loss of detail in characters’ expression and sense of depth.”

-Recommendation of the Register of Copyrights, October 2012 (Page 133)

Despite the clear and rather unambiguous fair use argument that exists for the video, Lionsgate Entertainment has now abused YouTube’s system and filed a DMCA takedown and had my remix deleted for “copyright infringement”. Below is a brief chronicle of my struggle to get Buffy vs Edward back on YouTube where it belongs.

On October 9th 2012 I received a message from YouTube stating that Buffy vs Edward had “matched third party content” owned or licensed by Lionsgate and “ads may appear next to it”. Lionsgate acquired ownership of the Twilight movie franchise in 2012 (via the purchase of Summit Entertainment for 412 million dollars) so the claim appeared to be directed at the 1 minute 48 seconds of footage I quoted from the first Twilight movie in my 6 minute remix.

I always turn all ads off on my remix videos and never profit off them. But sure enough when I checked my channel, Lionsgate was monetizing my noncommercial fair use remix with ads for Nordstrom fall fashions which popped up over top of my gender critique of pop culture vampires. Incidentally this copyright claim also prevented the remix from playing on all iOS devices like iPads and iPhones becuase they are not ”monetized platforms“.

I thought perhaps YouTube’s Content ID System had automatically tagged the video and didn’t understand that it was a fair use. In the hopes I could get the mistake cleared up I immediately used YouTube’s built-in process to register a fair use dispute.

Less then 24 hours later however I received another message from YouTube informing me that Lionsgate had reviewed my fair use claim and rejected it, reinstating their claim on the remix and again monetizing the video with intrusive popup ads.

Concerned at what appeared to be a blatant disregard for fair use previsions, I contacted a lawyer at New Media Rights named Art Neill. New Media Rights drafted a rather detailed 1000 word legal argument citing case law and explaining how Buffy vs Edward was in fact about as clear of an example of fair use as exists. This included fair use arguments for the nature and purpose of the transformative use, amount used and market effect. YouTube’s built-in system now allows for a second round of copyright disputes, called an appeal process. So I returned to YouTube and filed an official appeal of the reinstated bogus copyright claim by Lionsgate using the fair use argument and legal language from my lawyer. (See the full text of the fair use argument we made here.)

On November 26th 2012, after a month of waiting, I finally got a response stating that Lionsgate had decided to release their copyright claim on my remix. Victory!

Or so I thought.

That same day I noticed another notification from YouTube saying that my Buffy vs Edward remix had “matched third party content” owned or licensed by Lionsgate and that ads may appear on my video. Wait what? Deja-vu. Hadn’t I just spent nearly 2 months dealing with exactly that? On closer inspection this new claim was for “visual content” owned by Lionsgate and the claim I had just fought and finally won had been for “audiovisual” content. No further information was provided as to what the difference was between the two claims or what content exactly was supposedly infringing.

It appeared as though Lionsgate just filed two separate infringement claims on the same piece of media.

 Confused and slightly frustrated I once again embarked on repeating the same dispute process as before. I filed my fair use dispute via YouTube’s built-in form exactly as I had the first time around.

Again, just like the first time, it was rejected by Lionsgate within 24 hours and they reinstated their claim on the remix.

So again I filed my second long-form appeal using YouTube’s system, again making the detailed legal arguments crafted by my lawyer at New Media Rights which again lay out very clearly all the fair use arguments. And again, I waited for a response.

On December 18th I received notification from YouTube that Lionsgate had again ignored my fair use arguments, rejected my appeal and this time had the remix deleted from YouTube entirely.

I was dumbfounded. And to add insult to injury I was now locked out of my YouTube account and had a copyright infringement “strike” placed on my channel.

In order to regain access to my account I was also forced to attend YouTube’s insulting “copyright school” and take a test on fair use. Since I’ve been giving lectures on fair use doctrine for artists and video makers for a number of years this was a breeze, but still insulting because my video was not infringing in the first place.

Once I was allowed back into my account I found  that YouTube is now penalizing me for this “strike” by preventing me from uploading videos longer than 15 minutes.

I consulted my lawyer again, and following the advice on YouTube’s copyright FAQ page, he reached out to the representatives of Lionsgate who administer their online content and  had issued the DMCA takedown. What he found out from that correspondence was worrying.

Representatives of Lionsgate, a company called MovieClips that claims to manage Lionsgate’s clips on Youtube, confirmed in an email to New Media Rights that they had filed a DMCA takedown on Buffy vs Edward because I did not want them to monetize the remix. In fact this is exactly what the company’s representative, Matty Van Schoor, said in a response email to New Media Rights on December 20, 2012.

“The audio/visual content of this video has been reviewed by our team as well as the YouTube content ID system and it has been determined that the video utilizes copyrighted works belonging to Lionsgate. Had our requestes to monetize this video not been disputed, we would have placed an ad on the cotent [sic] and allowed it to remain online. Unfortunately after appeal, we are left with no other option than to remove the content.”

No other option? How about recognizing it is fair use and dropping the complaint? They did not answer or even acknowledge our fair use arguments via email, despite fair use being raised multiple times. 

Perhaps this is just the action of a rogue studio, but it hints at a bit of a nightmare scenario for transformative media makers and remix artists. The fear is that fair use will be ignored in favor of a monetizing model in which media corporations will “allow” critical, educational and/or transformative works only if they can retain effective ownership and directly profit off them.

It appears that Lionsgate is attempting to do just that. What if every time The Daily Show made fun of a Fox News clip, News Corp. was allowed to claim ownership over the entire Daily Show episode in order to monetize it?

There are limitations on takedowns. For instance, as Neill from New Media Rights points out, the DMCA Section 512 prohibits knowingly, materially misrepresenting any information in takedown notices. At least one court, the case of the baby dancing to Prince in the Lenz case, has even required that DMCA takedown notice senders consider fair use before sending a takedown.

Buffy vs Edward has now been offline for 3 weeks. Over the past year, before the takedown, the remix had been viewed an average of  34,000 times per month.

Since none of YouTube’s internal systems were able to prevent this abuse by Lionsgate, and our direct outreach to the content owner hit a brick wall, with the help of New Media Rights I have now filed an official DMCA counter-notification with YouTube. Lionsgate has 14 days to either allow the remix back online or sue me. We will see what happens.

This is what a broken copyright enforcement system looks like.

One last note, New Media Rights has offered me invaluable advice and guidance throughout this battle. They are a small, non-profit two lawyer operation on a shoe-string budget fighting to make sure artists like me are heard. So if you can please consider donating to them here.

PS: Until we can get the takedown reversed, you can still watch the HTML5 popup video version of Buffy vs Edward here.

PRESS: 

• Forbes – Copyright In The Twilight Zone: The Strange Case Of Buffy vs Edward
• Ars Technica – Buffy vs Edward remix back online, but no fallout for Lionsgate
• Boing Boing – Lionsgate commits copyfraud, has classic Buffy vs Edward censored
• The Mary Sue – Buffy vs Edward Fan Mashup Wins Copyright Struggle
• The Daily Dot – Buffy vs Edward Back on YouTube After 3-month Legal Battle
• Blastr – How Buffy kept slaying Edward despite a Lionsgate copyright lawsuit
• EFF – Copyright Vampires Attempt to Suck the Lifeblood Out of Fair Use Video

Wayne Enterprises :: Everything Everywhere Everyday

It’s no secret that Batman is funded and equipped via Bruce Wayne’s multi-billion dollar fortune and through his ownership of Wayne Enterprises. What you might not know is that Wayne Enterprises is a monster company of truly Orwellian proportions. If the corporation really existed it would most likely be the largest, most powerful company on the planet – bigger than General Electric, Boeing, Chevron and Lockheed Martin combined.

Although primarily known as a military defense contractor, Wayne Enterprises is actually comprised of dozens of subsidiaries involved in all sectors of the economy in Gotham City and around the world (operating in 190 countries). Based on the DC and Batman wikis the corporation includes the following divisions:

Wayne Electronics
Wayne Technologies
Wayne Biotech
Wayne Medical
Wayne Healthcare (which runs the Gotham City healthcare system)
Wayne Pharmaceuticals
Wayne Foods
Wayne Shipping
Wayne Steel
Wayne Automotive
Wayne Shipbuilders
Wayne Aerospace
Wayne Weapons
Wayne Aviation
Wayne Airlines
Wayne Chemicals
Wayne Industries
Wayne Oil
Wayne Botanical
Wayne Mining
Wayne Manufacturing
Wayne Research Institute
Wayne Energy
Wayne Electric
Wayne Studios
Wayne Entertainment (including ownership of The Daily Planet newspaper)
Wayne Records
Wayne Stage
Wayne Television
Wayne Retail

Based on this extensive list of properties and holdings, Forbes’ magazine seems to have severely underestimated the value of the company in their 2007 list of the 25 Largest Fictional Companies. Forbes estimated Wayne Enterprises sales at only $31.3 billion which is a ludicrously low figure for such an omnipresent multinational corporation.

MORE INFO
This ad was made as part of the upcoming Batman Reimagined film remixing project.

CREDITS
Producer/Editor – Jonathan McIntosh
Voice Actor – Paul Silverman
Logo After Effects – Greg Dorsainville @sciencelifeny

SOURCE FOOTAGE
The clips used in this remix were appropriated from dozens of TV ads for real-life corporations with operations or products similar to Wayne Enterprises or its subsidiaries. Specifically “brand identity” ads for General Electric, Boeing, Chevron and Lockheed Martin were used as the basic template for the commercial. Additionally footage was borrowed from the films Batman & Robin, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises trailer and Atlas Shrugged Part 1.

FAIR USE NOTICE
This transformative remix work constitutes a fair use of any copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US copyright law. “Wayne Enterprises TV Commercial” was remixed by Jonathan McIntosh and is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 License permitting only non-commercial sharing and remix with attribution.

Video Description:
When I saw Google had somehow forgotten to include any ads in their Project Glass promotional video I just couldn’t resist fixing that little oversight for them. So less then 24 hours after Google released their video I remixed and uploaded my own slightly more realistic version of the augmented reality glasses – now featuring contextual Google Ads for your life!

Of course I’m exaggerating a bit here for visual effect to mimic the modern web browsing experience. Google will probably not be this obvious with their interface but there’s no question the company will be gathering massive amounts of extremely sensitive personal data based on what you look at and for how long. The company may use this data to build detailed consumer profiles and/or sell über targeted ads. Because let’s face it, Google really is just a massive advertising company at heart.

For the record: All of the AdWords used are actual Google ad returns found via Google searches based on the dialog, situation or setting in the original Google video. Yes “Music, Stop!” does actually return an ad asking if you’d like to listen to music.

Google really can’t be too annoyed at this remix because after all I’m just putting Google Ads overtop of a Google video on Google’s owned video hosting service. Still I should point out that they have not yet accepted my video response request on YouTube.

Press & Media:
• The Atlantic – A Remix of Google’s Project Glass Video—Now With Ads
• ABC News – Google Glasses: Will You Want Google Tracking Your Eyes?
• Slate – What’s Missing From Google’s Project Glass Concept Video? Ads!
• Washington Post – Google’s Project Glass gets an ad makeover
• Forbes – Here’s What Google Glasses Will Really Show (Ads, Of Course)
• Huffington Post – Google Glasses With Google Ads Shows Terrible Future Ahead
• Gawker - What Google’s Creepy Cyborg Glasses Will Probably Be Like: Ad-Heavy
• FOX News - Parody Videos Take on Google Glasses Project
• NY Times Bits – The heavily monetized remix of Google’s Project Glass video
• TPM – Google Glasses Get Ads In Hilarious Remix Video‎
• Fast Company – With Google’s New Glasses, Your Head Is Your Smartphone‎
• CTV – Google touts connected vision with Project Glass‎
• San Francisco Chronicle – Google’s Internet glasses a window into isolation
• Smithsonian Magazine - Google Goggles Aim to Augment Reality
• PC Magazine – Wearing Google’s Project Glass
• CNET - Google’s Project Glass: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet
• TreeHugger – Augmented Reality Glasses Offer Peek Into Our Consumerist Future
• Gizmodo – The Five Funniest Google Glasses Parodies
• WSJ All Things D – Google Glasses Complete With Inevitable Annoying Ads
NEW • CNET – Adbusting satirical video sees through Google’s new goggles
NEW • PSFK - Was Google’s Project Glass Created Just To Sell Ads?

Video Still:

Click to see full size image

Further Reading:
Back in February 2012 Sebastian Anthony wrote about the then-rumored Google glasses on Extreme Tech saying - “Remember, Google is ultimately an advertising company, where eyeballs directly translate into money — and it’s hard to get any closer to your eyes than a pair of augmented reality glasses. When you look at a car dealership, Google will be able to display ads from a competitor. When you sit in front of a computer, or TV, or stare through a shop window, the glasses will be able to track your head movements and report back on the efficacy of display ads. Perhaps most excitingly, when you read a newspaper or book or other static medium, Google could even overlay its own, interactive ads.”

Fair Use Notice:
This transformative remix work constitutes a fair use of any copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US copyright law. “ADmented Reality” was remixed by Jonathan McIntosh and is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 License permitting non-commercial sharing and remixing with attribution.

Click to view my full article via TWC

An article and video collection I put together was recently published in the Open Access journal Transformative Works and Cultures. The full piece entitled “A history of subversive remix video before YouTube: 30 political video mashups made between World War II and 2005″ is licensed under creative commons and can be viewed for free online via the TWC website.

I first began recording and remixing TV commercials back in 2003 as a response to the US lead invasion of Iraq. At the time I’d only seen a small handful of what are now commonly referred to as video mashups. I certainly had no idea that what I was doing on my computer was part of a long underground remix video tradition which can be traced back to almost  the very beginning of moving picture technology.

Over the past few years I’ve seen a number of great remix video collections but none that really focus on the dynamic pre-youtube history of the genre and none that include the obvious intersections with fannish vidding traditions (which date back to at least the mid 1970s). While my collection is not meant to be a complete genealogy, I do believe the works I chose are representative of the subversive remix video genre over the past 60 plus years.

For the purposes of creating this history I used five essential criteria to decide if a transformative video work fit into the political remix genre.

1. Works appropriate mass media audiovisual source material without permission from copyright holders, and rely on the fair use doctrine (or fair dealing in the UK).
2. Works comment on, deconstruct, or challenge media narratives, dominant myths, social norms, and traditional power structures—they can be either sympathetic to or antagonistic to their pop culture sources, sometimes both at the same time.
3. Works transform the original messages embedded in the source material, as well as the source material itself.
4. Works are intended for general audiences or do-it-yourself (DIY) communities rather than academic or high-art audiences, and thus tend to use familiar mass media formats such as trailers, television ads, music videos, and news segments as vehicles for the transformed messages.
5. Works are DIY productions and rely on grassroots distribution methods such as VHS tape duplicating circles, underground screenings, and, eventually, self-hosted Web sites. Since its launch in November 2005 many subversive video makers now put their works on YouTube.

Below I’ve embedded the YouTube playlist I put together including all 30 remixes from my article. I’ll do my best to keep them all online and fight the inevitable tide of bogus content ID matching takedowns. Please make sure to check out the full TWC journal article for an overview of the subgenre and descriptions of each video in the collection.

EXTRA: Martin Leduc of Carleton University in Ottawa Canada also wrote an interesting article inTransformative Works and Cultures about how my own remix video work has changed over the last decade or so. Make sure you check out his article which is titled The two-source illusion: How vidding practices changed Jonathan McIntosh’s political remix videos. 

New LEGO Friends mini-doll with LEGO Alien Defense Unit traditional style mini-figure

In January 2012 the LEGO Group released their “LEGO for girls” line called Friends which includes a series of pink pastel colored kits focused on the lives of 5 Polly Pocket style mini-dolls. In the TV commercials these mini-dolls bake cupcakes, go to the beauty shop and take care of pets. In contrast LEGO produces over a dozen themes marketed primarily to boys which feature aliens, cops and robbers, space battles, knights and pirates. The TV commercials for these LEGO lines focus on action, violence and combat based play scenarios.

I thought a good way to illustrate the absurd gender stereotyping in each set of ads was to drop them into my HTML5 Gendered Advertising Remixer web app. Sure enough the remixing tool produces some hilarious and insightful gender juxtapositions. Read more about this project on the blog and try the remixing LEGO’s commercials for yourself!

NOTE: Please make sure to upgrade your web browser before remixing

A short remixed supercut made from 22 LEGO television commercials for 12 different LEGO themes released between 2009 and 2012. LEGO’s marketing aimed at boys has become progressively more aggressive and violent over and now focuses primarily on conflict and combat play scenarios.

This video montage was originally created for Feminist Frequency’s webisode:
The LEGO Boys Club – LEGO and Gender Part 2

All the ads used in the remix are listed below in the order they appear:

• LEGO Ninjago Spinners – Wu vs Garmadon
• LEGO Ninjago Spinners – Hai vs Bonezai
• LEGO Star Wars – Republic Attack Shuttle
• LEGO Power Miners – Rock Wrecker
• LEGO Kingdoms – Mill Village Raid
• LEGO Alien Conquest – Earth Defense HQ
• LEGO Star Wars – ARC-170 Starfighter
• LEGO Superheroes – Batman
• LEGO Atlantis – Typhoon Turbo Sub
• LEGO Star Wars – Venator-Class Attack Cruiser
• LEGO Star Wars – X-Wing Fighter
• LEGO Ninjago – Fire Temple
• LEGO Prince of Persia – Quest Against Time
• LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean – Queen Anne’s Revenge
• LEGO Kingdoms – King’s Castle
• LEGO Agents 2.0 – Mobile Command Center
• LEGO Star Wars – Republic Frigate
• LEGO World Racers – Desert of Destruction
• LEGO Space Police 3 – Space Police Central
• LEGO Star Wars – Clone Turbo Tank
• LEGO Ninjago – Ice Dragon
• LEGO Star Wars – Imperial Star Destroyer

Since 2005 LEGO has produced 27 firefighter kits for their regular LEGO City theme which is marketed to boys. Those sets include a total of 51 mini-figures. Only 1 of them is female.

This image was originally created for Feminist Frequency’s video web series on LEGO and Gender (on which I also volunteered as a digital researcher).

HTML5 poster attribute image for the demo

Last year I used the HTML5 <video> element combined with the PopcornJS framework to dynamically display source media data in separate boxes around my Donald Duck Meets Glenn Beck remix as the video played in real time. This time around I was interested in exploring ways to layer data directly on top of the video itself.

A few months ago during the 2011 Open Video Conference I began a conversation with Brian Chirls of the Mozilla Popcorn team about the possibility of creating a pop-up video style template for PopcornJS.

In order to demonstrate video data layering I thought it’d be fun to mimic the style of VH1′s classic Pop-Up Video show using my viral remix Buffy vs Edward. Over the next couple months Brian and I brainstormed how pop-ups could best be implemented using a Popcorn Maker template so that anyone could easily create their own pop-up videos. At the official alpha launch of the Popcorn Maker tool during the 2011 Mozilla Festival in London Brian had a working version of the template up and running. I was even able to hack together a 1st rough draft of this demo to show at the MozFest closing circle.

Click above to open the Buffy vs Edward pop-up demo

Now that I’ve had some extra time to iron out the bugs you can see pop-up demo for yourself. There are 70 separate pop-ups with data covering everything you ever wanted to know about Buffy vs Edward including production notes and even a few tips for dealing with real-life stalkers. Please make sure you are using the latest Chrome or Firefox web-browsers. I hear from others that it also works in the latest Opera as well as the newer Safari desktop and ipad versions (sorry iphone users Apple currently disables inline video playback and forces videos into full screen mode without the pop-ups). Click here to open the Buffy vs Edward pop-up video demo!

A few notes on my authoring process

This time around I used the newly released Mozilla Popcorn Maker app to assist me in the PopcornJS authoring process. Back when I built my Donald Duck demo I had to individually hand coded each annotation into one giant XML document. Thankfully the Popcorn Maker has now made everything a whole hell of lot easier.

Pop Video template options

Before I opened my Popcorn Maker project though I had to transcode my video file into a open video format that plays nicely with HTML5. I picked WebM for this demo – which I was able to easily encode with the nifty FireFogg encoder plugin for Firefox.  I also used a fallback mp4 file type for Safari and ipad since Apple doesn’t natively support Ogg Theora or WebM. Once that was done I hosted the video on my server, plugged the video URL into Popcorn Maker and selected the “Pop Video” template.

At that point I was able to simply drag and drop each pop-up on the timeline and see the result almost immediately in the video box above (See screen-grab of my workflow inside the app below). After placing a pop-up on the timeline I could just double click to open the options window to enter my text, set the pop-up duration and choose an icon.

When finished, Popcorn Maker gave me the option to export a basic HTML page with my project embedded which I tweaked to fit the style of my own website. Since this demo had so many pop-up elements and took over a month to complete I also made extensive use of the JSON export function to save/back-up my progress into a text file as I worked.

Workflow inside the Mozilla Popcorn Maker app

Elisa Kreisinger shares her experiences using the app to teach media literacy skills in the classroom

The 2011 Open Video Conference at New York Law School was devoted to “builders, tinkers, makers, and doers” and with that in mind I was excited to lead a session (entitled Building a Better Remix Maker) which focused on creating intuitive, accessible open tools to make video remixing easier and promote media literacy.

During the 2010 OVC Hack Day the original flash based Gendered Advertising Remixer Application was born from a collaboration with Zohar Babin from Kaltura. So the first order of business this year was to try and re-create a new open source version of the tool using HTML5, Popcorn.js and JavaScript.

And after three days of collaboration with an incredible team of people at the conference we were able to achieve just that! We currently have a working HTML5 demo version up and running. At the moment it requires either the latest Firefox or Chrome web browsers to work correctly. You can take a look at the code on github and fork the project to expand it or create your own version.

Martin Leduc leads a brainstorming session with educators on future HTML5 remixing apps

As part of the session we also sat down with media literacy advocates, educators and video artists to brainstorm ideas for future HTML5 video remixing tools for use in the classroom and beyond.

The flash version also got some exciting new features including the ability to swap selected clips and instantly see the inverse of your mashup pairing. Even better you can now download your remixes to your desktop or publish them directly to YouTube all from within the app! (You can also fork the Flex version on github.)

Jonathan McIntosh and Boaz Sender discuss goals for building the HTML5 Remixer

Stay tuned for more updates on these project!

Special thanks to the truly impressive groups of people we assembled to make this HTML5 remixer a happen. The core team included: Boaz Sender (@BoazSender), Zohar Babin (@zohar), Martin Leduc (@ikat381), Elisa Kreisinger (@elisakreisinger), Mark Reilly (@alien_resident), Greg Dorsainville (@ScienceLifeNY) Brian Chirls (@bchirls) and me – Jonathan McIntosh (@radicalbytes).

- Photos via curiousjohn on Flickr.