Law and Software

This is a virtual mashup. No copyright owners were harmed in the making of this movie. Because it was never made.

The Punk Prayer Gangnam Style is a virtual mashup. Psy would look so much better in a yellow ski mask, so….

I built this player – currently codenamed the Pussy Riot Gangnam Style Player – using the YouTube Javascript API. It takes the video IDs from two youtube movies of your choosing. It stacks two movie players so the “audio track” player is behind the “video track” and it mutes the video track.

It also only works on modern browsers. Sorry pre-IE8 windozers. And also sorry Ipad users. I didn’t know before this, but Apple don’t seem to allow non-apple apps to adjust sound volume. Only users can do this with the hardware switch. Interesting. Wasn’t private APIs and the unlevel playing field the reason for M$’s antitrust woes in the ’90s?

Nothing has been altered or modified. There is no derivative work. I can get the same effect by watching a video while listening to music on my ipod. The mashup is virtual. [To the person who used a screen-capture program to merge these two videos into a single movie for youtube a few days back – duh! you so miss the point]

This is a trivial example of Legal Tech 2.0. Not your dad’s legal tech, for automating legal research and billing more hours for less work. Legal Tech 2.0 is code that looks at a legal problem from a new angle and allows people to be creative and live their lives without infringing copyright laws that were never intended to target them. Flagship Legal Tech 2.0 has to be iTunes. And don’t forget Creative Commons.

<div id="playdiv">
<script src="http://www.lawandsoftware.com/software/prgsp-c-01.js">
</script>
<script>
           var parms = { soundtrack: 'HDJXgiUe_EM',
                         view: 'LW-JbhBCouE',
                         title: 'Punk Prayer Gangnam Style'
           };
           prgsp( "playdiv", parms);
</script>
</div>

This is not (yet) a wordpress plugin. The latest code can be found here. The player is embedded in a web page, which is accessed through an iframe:

<iframe style=”border:none;” src=”http://www.lawandsoftware.com/software/prgsp.html” width=”650px” height=”450px”></iframe>

I’m looking for good video pairs. That’s what the comments section is for 🙂

Here’s another one