Wow, what liberals will not to to cover their own backsides and make themselves look good. I blogged a little about this last week, about the CNN reporter who basically tried to make the Tea-Party protesters look like a bunch of Fox News devotees. Anyhow, well, a little clip of her being confronted by one of the persons at the Tea-Party was posted by the Blog, named “Founding Bloggers”, and was posted to YouTube. Well, CNN comes along and files a trademark infringement complaint and it gets yanked.

Patterico, who hates me with the heat of a thousand hells; picks it up:

I’m sick of people knocking embarrassing videos off YouTube with bogus copyright violation claims.

The latest culprit is CNN, a network that was recently embarrassed by a video of reporter Susan Roesgen cutting off tea-party protestors in Chicago, and assailing them with silly liberal talking points. The blog Founding Bloggers showed up on scene and caught her in further arguments with angry citizens who noted her biased coverage. I posted the Founding Bloggers video on Thursday.

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And if they take that one down, well, I happen to have my own copy sitting around here somewhere. I have posted it on YouTube as well.

They’ll probably take our copies down, too. If they do, I’ll look for other sites to upload it to, or perhaps try to embed it here on the blog. And I may take Ben Sheffner’s advice and file a DMCA counternotice. If CNN wants to sue me, we can make this a test case.

In the meantime, I encourage every reader with a YouTube account to upload this video to YouTube. I encourage every blogger reading this to embed this same video to your own site.

We have to stop these thugs from reading fair use out of the law whenever they’re embarrassed.

A man by the name of Ben Sheffner from the Blog “Copyrights and Campaigns“, offers this legal advice:

CNN does own copyright in its own news footage and, as a general matter, has the right to demand its removal from YouTube. However, as to this particular video, I think Founding Bloggers has a very strong fair use defense. The purpose for Founding Bloggers’ posting of the CNN footage is crystal clear: to comment on and criticize CNN’s reporting on the “Tea Party.” Such a use is right in the heartland of the fair use doctrine; the statute specifically mentions “criticism, comment, [and] news reporting” as protected uses that are “not an infringement of copyright.” 17 U.S.C. § 107. To quickly run through the four fair use factors as they apply here: 1) the use is transformative (for critical comment); 2) the CNN footage is factual, not fictional, and was previously broadcast; 3) the amount used is small in relation to the whole CNN broadcast; and 4) any effect on the market is minuscule (and if fewer people watch CNN because this video causes them to think less of its coverage, that’s simply not cognizable harm). Many fair use cases are difficult, close calls–but, given the facts as I know them, this is an easy one.

In others, CNN is full of it, and that if Patterico wants to file a lawsuit or in this case, a counter-suit, it would be an easy win. Me and Patterico have not always seen eye to eye on some things in the past. But I am with him on this one here; what CNN is doing here, is nothing more than outright fascism, controlling the message, controlling their image and trying to wipe out any sort of negative message out about their company. As far as I am concerned this is the exact thing that Hitler did in Nazi Germany in the 1940’s. He jailed and usually killed anyone that spoke out against him. The Communists did this as well. As does North Korea and Iran. So, I think CNN needs to back away from the censorship deal, because this could very well blow up in their faces. I mean, they are already being murdered in the ratings by Fox News and MSNBC as well and this sure is not going to help.

I wish Patterico all the best of luck in this one. Because I think that the MSM needs to be sent a message, and that message is that you cannot totally control your so called “Image” to the point of trying to make true reality disappear.

Update: Welcome Freeper readers, and thanks to Lori for linking! 😀