Misunderstanding Copyright Law And Ruining Everyone's Fun
So the video that everyone has been talking about is history - the victim of a bullying tactic by a photographer and her lawyer. Once again, a perversion of copyright is being used to destroy art.
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes out an arc TechCrunch has been tracking all year on copyright enforcement run amok online: back in October the site flagged what it called stupid and litigious behavior around web content disputes, and even TechCrunch itself received a cease-and-desist from YouTube in November 2006. The pattern is that takedown notices are being deployed not to stop piracy but to silence widely shared creative work.
Here, photographer Lane Hartwell and her lawyer forced the removal of the 'Here Comes Another Bubble' video — a parody built partly on one of her photos — and the story traveled fast enough that both Wired News and mathewingram.com ran their own takes the same day, with the latter arguing outright that she was wrong. The split reaction matters: this is now a visible argument about where fair use ends, not just a private dispute.
First-order effects
- The video's creators lose the audience momentum of a clip that had become the talk of the week, and anyone who embedded or linked it now points at nothing.
- Hartwell's lawyer demonstrates that a single takedown demand against a hosting platform is enough to erase a viral work without any court weighing whether the use was fair.
Second-order effects
- Platforms hosting user-generated video face renewed pressure over how mechanically they honor such demands, since honoring them instantly makes the rightsholder's leverage near-absolute.
- Remix artists and satirists building on found images get a warning shot: incorporating third-party photography into commentary carries takedown risk regardless of transformative intent, pushing some toward licensed stock or original footage.
Third-order effects
- If takedown-first enforcement stays this cheap and effective, the de facto standard for online reuse becomes whatever survives a lawyer's letter rather than what copyright law's fair-use doctrine actually permits — a gap between legal theory and platform practice that invites legislative or judicial correction.
- The episode feeds a broader framing, already visible in TechCrunch's earlier coverage, of copyright being 'perverted' into a censorship tool — a narrative that shapes how future creator-versus-creator disputes get judged publicly before any legal process runs.
The trend: Copyright enforcement on the web is shifting from courtroom adjudication to instant platform takedowns, letting individual rightsholders decide by default what the public may see.