I don’t normally do this, but this clip from YouTube so grabbed my heart this morning that I thought I’d share it along with a little commentary. There are two points here for media observers:

One, this is the real value of YouTube and “the problem” for the industry that has had a lock on the video niche for a half-century. I suspect that on this Valentine’s Day, many thousands of people will be touched by little Andrew. As of this writing, the video has been viewed 53,878 times. Let’s see what that is by day’s end. While all the publicity about YouTube centers around big media getting screwed, the users of the site keep populating it with items like this.

The second point is that the song in the video is by Akon, a Universal/Motown recording artist. It’s either playing on the radio or on a CD or MP3 in the car. That Andrew’s parents have now “recorded” the boy singing along with the copyrighted song is a violation of copyright law. A lawyer could argue that it’s a music video for which the artist, writer, band, studio and record company were not compensated.

And I suspect that I am, technically, complicit in breaking the law by sharing this copyrighted work here. This is the absurdity of the law in the digital age and why we need to re-write the thing.

So, whether you’re alone or not on this Valentine’s Day, enjoy Andrew singing Akon’s version of “Lonely.” He really gets into it about 2 minutes into the tune, so hang with it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 at 9:02 am and is filed under Media 2.0, Citizens Media, Copyright. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.