Alex Hern 

Trump’s video taken off Twitter after band Nickelback complains

US president receives copyright censure over clip that took aim at political rival Joe Biden
  
  

The clip featured a doctored version of Nickelback’s 2015 music video Photograph.
The clip featured a doctored version of Nickelback’s 2015 music video Photograph. Photograph: Twitter | @realDonaldTrump

A video posted by Donald Trump has been removed from Twitter after a copyright claim by the rock band Nickelback.

The video took aim at the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, opening with a clip of him saying he had never discussed business dealings with his son Hunter. Trump’s efforts to encourage the Ukrainian president to investigate Hunter Biden lie at the centre of an impeachment inquiry launched by House Democrats last week.

Following the Biden segment, the clip posted by Trump then cuts to a popular, if niche, meme based on an edit of the music video for the 2005 Nickelback single Photograph. In the original video, the vocalist Chad Kroeger holds a picture to the camera, singing:

Look at this photograph / Every time I do it makes me laugh / How did our eyes get so red? / And what the hell is on Joey’s head?

The meme revolves around people digitally inserting other pictures into the frame.

In Trump’s edit, Kroeger’s photograph is replaced by one taken in 2014 that shows both the Bidens on a golf course with Devon Archer, a colleague of Hunter who is labelled in the edit as a “Ukraine gas exec”.

Within 12 hours of the video being posted to Twitter, however, it had been removed and replaced with the notice: “This media has been disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner.” The video is currently available on YouTube.

It is the second time this year that the American president has been censured for infringing copyright on Twitter. In April, a campaign advert, scored with the soundtrack to the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises, was removed following a takedown notice from the copyright holder Warner Bros.

The copyright removals stand in contrast to Twitter’s policy about Trump’s tweets, which specifically place the president above the law when it comes to enforcement of the social network’s own regulations. In June, the company announced a policy to restrict, but not remove, some tweets by famous politicians that break its rules about abusive behaviour.

The social network argued that if those tweets were newsworthy, then even if they were likely to cause some harm, it would not be in the public interest to remove them.

 

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