When David Cameron’s government relaxed copyright laws last week, it might not have intended to help fund those poking fun at the prime minister.
But that might be one consequence of the law change for mashup duo Cassetteboy, whose remix of Cameron’s speeches has now been watched more than 3.5 million times on YouTube.
Mike, one half of Cassetteboy, tells the Guardian that he now hopes it will be possible to make money from his hobby of cutting up videos and re-editing them.
His day job is writing audio descriptions of TV shows for the blind, which he says funds his hobby.
The duo started off making audio parodies, and moved into video with mashups spoofing shows from The Apprentice to Dragons’ Den.
Until last week, the videos he made with his partner-in-crime Steve – who works in an art gallery – would have contravened UK copyright law. But the amendment to the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 has brought them in from the cold.
Despite the success of their Cameron video, the pair haven’t made a penny from their work so far.
The change in the law makes it legal for people to use a “limited amount” of copyrighted material in online video for the purposes of “parody, caricature or pastiche” without the consent of the copyright holder, as long as the work doesn’t convey a discriminatory message or compete with the original. It will be up to a judge to decide whether the video is funny enough to count as parody.
“There’s obviously public demand for our videos, but it was more or less impossible for people to pay us to actually make them,” says Mike. The duo have tried and failed to get TV shows off the ground in the past, but broadcasters were nervous about the legal position of the content: “It was much easier for them to commission another panel show or something less problematic.” Under the new law it would be legal to broadcast Cassetteboy’s work.
Mike likens the previous legal status of mashup videos to censorship: “I don’t see why our chosen form of expression was any less legitimate. If you look at our Dragon’s Den video [now taken down due to a complaint from rights holder Sony], it’s a clear parody of the show. It’s no different from Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse’s Dragon’s Den sketches. But theirs was legal and ours was illegal.”
Mashups, like other video formats that have proved popular on YouTube, are finding their way into the mainstream. This summer Sky News commissioned fellow YouTube mashup artist Swede Mason to create a video to promote its Scottish referendum coverage.
Mike sees the popularity of mashups as being down to the fact that they are an accessible form of film-making: “It’s not easy to do, but you don’t need very much to do it. You don’t need a camera or a microphone. You just need some footage and these days we’re drowning in digital content. You can’t move for it. It’s incredibly easy to find clips from a TV show, political speech or a song.”
Cassetteboy’s Mike and Steve got into mashups in their teens, when they would spend hours editing together audio tracks on cassette tapes for their friends. “The other half of Cassetteboy has better reaction times than me, so he was generally in charge of pressing the pause button as quickly as he possibly could,” says Mike. “I would sift through hundreds of cassettes looking for the word that we wanted.”
The change in the law doesn’t affect YouTube’s terms of service, so Cassetteboy videos are still sometimes taken down after complaints from the rights holder. Mike is currently bombarding Sony Pictures with tweets, asking it to withdraw a copyright claim against their Dragon’s Den parody.
And for the time being the pair will officially remain anonymous, although a quick Google search throws up their full names. “We’re still going to stay anonymous because it’s fun and we’re not sure the law change is going to cover everything we do,” says Mike. The pair make videos that use copyrighted content that, even though any judge would hopefully deem them funny, aren’t strictly parody.
Mike doesn’t think mashup will lose its underdog charm now that it’s a legal artform. “Although it will be legal for us to make these mashups, the rights holders still won’t be pleased. David Cameron won’t be pleased that we’ve made that video. Even though it’s legal, it’s still going to annoy a lot of powerful people.”
