Most of you probably know about at least some of the Hitler rant parodies on YouTube. There are hundreds, and most are based on a single scene in the German produced film best known as Downfall.
Apparently the film’s copyright owners have just become aware of these. YouTube has supposedly removed many of due to claims of copyright infringement. Here are a couple of stories about it.
What stories I’ve seen about this all have an American slant about “fair use” and how parody and satire have some legal protections. I don’t think, though, that this has made it into any courtroom yet. According to that first story, Youtube is removing the videos at the request of Constantin Film, using an automated filtering system called Content ID. But a lot of people are complaining that these parodies are not owned by Constantin.
But there are a lot of them still up. I’m not sure why this is, perhaps due to gaps or bugs in the filtering program.
Here are a couple of recent ones – Hitler rants about all the Youtube parodies of him
and
Hitler rants about being informed of “fair use” doctrine protecting parodies