Brands have been put on notice: You've got to fight, for your right, to go viral.
Earlier this week, a toy company called GoldieBlox made an inspirational promotional video featuring a parody of the 1987 Beastie Boys hit "Girls." The YouTube video quickly became a colossal viral marketing success, with more than 7.2 million views since Sunday. On Wednesday, the term "GoldieBlox" was searched more than 100,000 times on Google.
But now the stunt has ignited a budding legal battle with the Beastie Boys over the use of their song.
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The GoldieBlox video, embedded atop this post, features three girls taking unwanted — and stereotypically "girly" — toys to create a Rube Goldberg machine. In the background, the rather unsophisticated lyrics to "Girls" are replaced with messages of female empowerment and odes to science and engineering. It's become more than just a novelty item, however, set amid the larger conversation of how to get more girls involved in technology as a career path.
But, according to a lawsuit filed on Thursday by the toy company, "the Beastie Boys have now threatened GoldieBlox with copyright infringement." Lawyers for the Beastie Boys contend the GoldieBlox video, according to the company's court filing, "is a copyright infringement, is not a fair use and that GoldieBlox's unauthorized use of the Beastie Boys intellectual property is a 'big problem' that has a 'very significant impact.'"
The GoldieBlox filing comes in response to those alleged legal threats, asking a federal court in California to provide "declaratory relief" in the dispute.
Parsing through the legalese, GoldieBlox essentially wants a judge to declare that there is no basis for the Beastie Boys to file a copyright infringement suit, essentially nipping the fight in the bud. The GoldieLox filing also asks for protection against a DMCA takedown notice for the hit video. On Friday, meanwhile, a federal jury ordered Getty Images and the Agence France-Presse to pay a freelance photographer $1.2 million for using his photographs without permission following the massive 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
Taken together, the two controversies should be enough for most companies to think twice before using — or even adapting — content in the still murky and developing arena of digital copyright law.
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[ht The Hollywood Reporter]
Image: YouTube, GoldieBlox