Ellen DeGeneres’s friendship with ex-President George W. Bush became controversial this week, in light of the progressive values she claims and the 600,000 corpses left by his occupation of Iraq. She delivered a monologue on her show in response, casting their friendship as an example of civility, overcoming political differences, and having “faith in America”. So Rafael Shimunov added a simple backdrop of Iraq war scenes to her monolog, in the hopes DeGeneres might better understand the complaints. In response, copyright takedown notices flew and it was removed from the ‘net, so it is at least getting under her skin.
Here’s a copy, which I’ll update if and when it disappears.
Not one word of hers is changed, and there are no misleading or misrepresentative edits to her performance. Only the backdrop is changed, so that it now shows scenes of abuse, atrocity and horror from her friend’s ruinous war instead of the blue studio wall.
The video is transformative and offers clear editorial comment, so its creator could certainly avail himself of a fair use defense in court. But social media is not the courts, and the companies running the platforms tend to side quickly with takedown requests and respond slowly to counterclaims.
The Streisand Effect, however, is something celebs and their agents can rarely control: countless social media users are reposting the remix in response to its disappearance, spreading it far wider than Shimunov could have ever hoped.
Thanks to Ellen DeGeneres’ chilling of my antiwar criticism by filing fraudulent copyright claims on my video with 10K views, people are reuploading all over Twitter for a now collective 300K (and growing) views faster than @andylassner can file false claims.