there have been a bunch of cases in the last few years where politicians have been accused of misusing intellectual property in their campaign. the politician in question is almost always a republican. i'm not trying to bash republicans by saying that, it just seems to be true. the mccain campaign was accused multiple times of using copyrighted music without the artists' permission. jackson brown even sued.
one one level i understand the bind that republicans are in. if you have a rally and want to stir the crowd up, popular music is the way to go. popular musicians are not all liberal, but as a group they tend to lean left. democrats can probably get permission to use songs a lot easier than republicans.
so when i heard that chris christie had an ad that ripped off some scenes from monty python, i assumed the ad incorporated just a few clips. in fact, the entire commercial is basically the "it's the mind" skit. the ad seems to be no more technically sophisticated than one of those untergang videos that someone posts on youtube every ten seconds.1
i'm not really bothered by the intellectual property issues. the christie campaign pulled the ad as soon as monty python's lawyers contacted them. i'm just surprised that anyone would have thought the ad would be a good idea in the first place. they probably could have copied the basic joke of the sketch (talking about deja vu while saying the same stuff over and over again) without stealing the clip. but that would have costed more than paying some kid minimum wage to stick a few subtitles on an existing video clip.
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1. speaking of which, i've been looking for an excuse to post this one for the past few weeks:
