Free the Elian Wassup Video!

D

dZ

New member
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/elian/index.html

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>It was an act of courage - our valiant AP photographer had to storm the house, with not hing more than a small army of men with
guns to protect him. The subject of his picture was very elusive indeed - a sleeping boy. Surely it took the reflexes of a cat to
snap such a picture! This AP photographer will surely win a pulitzer for his truly honorable efforts to capture a small boy with a
gun aimed at his head.

It's a shame he has to be such a dick about it.

April 27, 2000 - Sean Bonner created the "Elian Wassup" video - an innocent and completely hilarious Flash animation. It was
submitted to the NG Portal, and quickly became one of the top pics. It wasn't much longer before the AP released the hounds -
Sean had to shut down his Geocities site early this morning. Tonight, I have shut down the movie on Newgrounds. It will be
missed... and let it be said that the AP sucks ass.

Read the legal threat we received.
Read some of the support letters from fans!
Sign up to receive news and updates on this matter! (blatant promotional plug)

My only question is this - did our brave photographer get model releases signed by all parties involved? As public figures in a
"newsworthy" item, these images are free for parody by fair use law. The sad part is, I don't have enough money to prove that in
court. First the BBC, now the AP... What is it with acronyms and Newgrounds? Hey, this is NG! Can't we all just get along?[/quote]
 
All we need to do is find an off shore server and put it there. find a country that doesn't recoginze/enforce/care about US copyright laws 9I'm sure we could find one) and go for it.

------------------
It ain't mah fault. did I do dat?
http://yellowman.virtualave.net/
 
Just a note. I tried to send David Tomlin an email, but i got it back with service unavailable. I'm gonna try again later.



------------------
It ain't mah fault. did I do dat?
http://yellowman.virtualave.net/
 
I had my hands slapped by Tomlin and AP News as well for assembling the seven bedroom-snatch photos into an animation (a rather powerful visual) and putting it on my web site. Drudge Report linked to it, and I had some 57,000 hits on ElianSnatch.gif before I had to take it down.
 
Playboy has the animation linked!

Whassup? Elián Parody Steams the AP
April 27, 2000
By Maribeth Bruno http://www.playboy.com/digital/inthenews.html
Chris Lathrop, a senior copywriter at
Playboy.com in Chicago, was good and
sick of America's latest pop icons, the
Budweiser "Whassup?" commercial and
Elián Gonzalez. As he walked his dogs
Monday night, a juxtaposition occurred
to him: to combine audio from the
commercial with photos documenting the
players in the Elián controversy. "My
inspiration was the Superfriends clip that
does the same thing," he says.

When Lathrop got home, he called his
friend and co-worker Sean Bonner, a
Playboy.com web designer, and
described his idea. Bonner got busy on
his home computer, producing a Flash
animation that begins with the infamous AP photo of an INS agent discovering
Donato Dalrymple and Elián in a closet and ends with the Presidential seal and
the word Stormtroopers. Bonner finished the clip Tuesday night and put it onto
Geocities' server "because I knew the traffic would kill my server," and then he
and Lathrop sent the URL to a few dozen of their friends.

The next morning, Lathrop was listening to the radio at work and heard
Chicago DJ Mancow Muller direct listeners to Muller's website and add, "Go
there for the Elián 'whassup' video, it's a must-see."

"I had told Sean, 'Some other idiot must have thought of this already,' so we
thought that's what it was, but when we went to the site and clicked the link, it
was our clip," says Lathrop.

Bonner adds, "We had 5000 hits by the time I came in Wednesday, and by 10
a.m. it was 20,000. Before noon it was almost 100,000, and by Wednesday
night we had 600,000 hits. I had set up a new email address to go to my
home server, and we had more than 700 emails -- and now more since we
posted our letter from the AP."
Ah, yes, the AP. David Tomlin, assistant
to the president of the Associated Press,
emailed Bonner this morning, saying he
had already written to Geocities about
the "unauthorized defacing and display
of AP pictures on your site there" and
wanted Bonner to also remove the
display at Newgrounds.com (a Flash
animation site that had asked Bonner
for the clip on Wednesday). You can see
the full letter at www.geocities.com/elian_true/, because
that's where Bonner and Lathrop decided
to put it as a replacement for their clip --
with Tomlin's phone number and email
address still attached.

"We don't want to deface anything from the AP," Lathrop says, "so we included
it exactly as it was."

After leaving a message for him this morning, Playboy.com's first contact with
Tomlin was a voice mail in which he promised to call back: "You may not be
able to get through to me again, because my line's been very busy today."
When we do speak, he explains that "we're like anyone with intellectual
property interests on the Internet. This is the first instance in which the
infringer has put the cease-and-desist note on the web, and the reaction has
been breathtaking. Many hostile messages, some threatening ones, but a
number have raised issues of free expression that I think are arguable. In
this particular case we might have been wiser to have taken a more
thoughtful, less heavy-handed approach. It's been a learning experience."

Asked about the many sites now
mirroring the parody, Tomlin
says, "You can't turn the ocean
back -- if the argument is who
can talk louder, the Internet is
always going to win. For now we'll
just watch what happens."

Lathrop says people have been
calling himself and Bonner
"pussies and wimps" for taking
the clip down, but they couldn't deny "first and foremost the fear of litigation."
Both say that the clip was created entirely as parody and not with a particular
political point of view.

"The 'Stormtroopers' thing could be construed as political," says Lathrop, "but
we used it because it has the same number of syllables as 'Budweiser.' And
we used the Presidential seal because it has an eagle in a circle just like the
Budweiser logo." (At this writing, the two have not heard from Budweiser.)

"My dad got me a subscription to Mad magazine when I was six years old,"
Lathrop continues, "and ever since then I've just wanted to make fun of
things, satirize stuff. We were just trying to be jerks, and we obviously
succeeded. We were offered the opportunity to profit monetarily -- banner
ads, T-shirts -- but we weren't interested."

Bonner adds, "The whole idea was to take something that people are taking
so ridiculously seriously and laughing at it; so we didn't want to take this
seriously. It's a joke."
 
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