Buffy vs. Edward Fan Mashup Wins Copyright Struggle With Lionsgate, Gets Back Online

In 2009 Jonathan McIntosh made a six minute long video by splicing together clips from Twilight and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and just a tiny, tiny bit of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), where Edward Cullen finds his vampire instincts turning his affections towards Buffy Summers, and he bites off quite a bit more than his fangs can properly chew. At the time, Summit Entertainment had better things to do than shut down cleverly made internet videos with millions of views and a Webby nomination, but everything changed when the Fire Nation –

No, I mean. Everything changed when Summit Entertainment, and therefore The Twilight Saga was acquired by Lionsgate a year ago.

That’s when his battle with the snarl of internet copyright infringement law in the US began. From the Daily Dot:

But after Lionsgate acquired Twilight in 2012, McIntosh went down a rabbit hole of copyright wrangling. In October, YouTube informed him that his video “may have content that is owned or licensed by Lionsgate,” and that it may start placing ads on the video. That indeed became the case, even though, as McIntosh said, “I always turn all ads off on my remix videos and never profit off them.”

YouTube offers a counterclaim system, which McIntosh used, noting that Twilight footage constituted less than a third of his video, essentially asking Lionsgate to admit their claim was a mistake. The company almost immediately rejected that counterclaim, meaning that McIntosh needed to file a formal appeal. He enlisted a lawyer, New Media Rights’s Art Neill, to write it.

He won the claim that the audiovisual elements from Twilight in his video were under the terms of fair use, but Lionsgate made a counterclaim against the use of their visual material content, and won, succeeding in getting the video removed. At this point McIntosh found out the company had issued a Digital Millennium Copyright claim against him, affecting his entire YouTube account. He lawyered up again, and yesterday Lionsgate admitted that their claim of copyright infringement was bogus, restoring Buffy vs. Edward and the rest of his videos to viewability. Which sounds pretty annoying and expensive, but even worse if McIntosh’s primary source of income was his YouTube channel, as is the case for no small number of people.

Why don’t we all give Buffy vs. Edward a celebratory watch?

(via The Daily Dot.)