This morning Rand Paul announced that he was running for president. There was a crowded auditorium and they were going wild and then he strode on up to the podium and music was blaring and it was all going great and he gave a speech and the crowd ate it up and they cheered his name and then he finished and they clapped and cheered and the campaign uploaded the video of the speech to YouTube so that the world could clap and cheer and…YouTube bots automatically pulled the video for unlicensed use of copyrighted material.
Womp womp.
Warner Music Group, the official owner of John Rich’s “Shutting Detroit Down,” a song about how much it sucks that rich corporations own things, has now shut Rand down.
Both Billboard and The Washington Post have reached out to get to the bottom of this and neither Warner or YouTube have commented on the situation.
The campaign’s video has now been deleted from YouTube (C-PSAN’s remains) but you can still enjoy the song in its entirety if you play it through John Rich’s YouTube page, where you can also admire WMG’s copyright claim in plain view:
The lesson, kids, is: if you ever run for president be sure to get permission to use copyrighted material before using it in your announcement speech. Otherwise the dream could end before it ever really begins.
