this land is your land

Absolutely high-larious Bush-Kerry flash movie parody, to the tune of This Land is Your Land. A guaranteed LOL. Thanks to fredshouse friend RC for passing it on!

Bush: "You're a liberal sissy!"

Kerry: "You're a right wing nut job!"

Both: "This land will surely vote for me!"

(Above link is a mirror site. There's also the more official atom films site with embedded advertising.)

UPDATE: Cory points out that the current copyright holder for This Land is Your Land has threatened the creators with an infringement lawsuit.

EFF notes the irony of such a claim, given Woody Guthrie's use of the following as his standard copyright notice:

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

From the related CNN Money article:

TRO [The Richmond Organization, the rightsholder] believes that the Jibjab [the brothers who created the parody] creation threatens to corrupt Guthrie's classic -- an icon of Americana -- by tying it to a political joke; upon hearing the music people would think about the yucks, not Guthrie's unifying message. The publisher wants Jibjab to stop distribution of the flash movie.

Of course the creators behind Jibjab don't agree.

"We consider it a case of political satire and parody and therefore entitled to the fair use exemption of the copyright act," said Jibjab attorney Ken Hertz.

Not that it matters to the law and the "rights" holders, but I think Woody would have rather liked this little tribute. Consider the penultimate verse of his song (via arlo.net, the official Arlo Guthrie website ;-):

As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there
And that sign said - no tress passin'
But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!

Posted by Gene at July 27, 2004 03:59 PM | TrackBack