Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Richter Scales' Tom Shields Speaks!

I ran into Richter Scales’ Tom Shields at a conference this morning in Mountain View, Calif., and he told me about the video takedown by YouTube of the popular “Here Comes Another Bubble.”

The music video parody by the San Francisco singing group has wowed the Web.

I posted about the removal here.

Shields defends the use of all material in the very funny video, noting it is a satire and they are not making any money it, pointing to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s explanation of fair use rules in place:

A Wide Berth for Transformative, Creative Uses: Copyright owners are within their rights to pursue nontransformative verbatim copying of their copyrighted materials online. However, where copyrighted materials are employed for purposes of comment, criticism, reporting, parody, satire, or scholarship, or as the raw material for other kinds of creative and transformative works, the resulting work will likely fall within the bounds of fair use.”

Here’s an interview with Shields that BoomTown did today (and posted on YouTube!):

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Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus