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Amazing. Jonathan McIntosh (a remix video artist) has written an interesting article on Ars Technica about what happened to him when Lionsgate (the copyright holder for the Twilight movies) decided that they should be making money from his mashup video that features clips of Edward from Twilight.

The short version is that he created a great mashup video of Buffy vs Edward several years ago. At some point in the recent past, Lionsgate decided to make a copyright claim on it and was able to have youtube start serving ads over the video (making money for Lionsgate).

When McIntosh realized what had happened, he filed a claim with youtube to reassert his rights as creator of the mashup video and have the ads removed (since one of the base tenets of Fair Use in copyright law is that you can’t make money from derivative works).

His claim was denied because Lionsgate refuted it more than once.

Eventually he got youtube to acknowledge the fact that he created the video in question (even though it features clips from the Twilight movies) and youtube returned ownership of the video to him so he could remove the ads.

Lionsgate then filed another claim to have the video taken down, which youtube did. The video has now been offline for 3 weeks.

There is merit on both sides of the argument. Lionsgate is the owner of the Twilight content, they paid a lot of money for it. However, copyright law makes it perfectly legal to use samples and clips of others’ work in creating new content, and especially so when the content is not used for profit. Technically, McIntosh is right that the video he created is his work and does not infringe on the copyright of the original work. The fact that Lionsgate can have his video taken down with little recourse for him is pretty nasty.

Anyway, the video is online at McIntosh’s website and requires a decent browser to view it. Besides the legal drama around it, the video is actually pretty cool and seems like an accurate representation of what would happen if Buffy met Edward.