Here Comes (Another) ‘Another Bubble’!
by Kara Swisher
Posted on December 18, 2007 at 10:15 PM PT
The take-down of the popular Web 2.0 music video, “Here Comes Another Bubble,” didn’t last too long. The Richter Scales, a San Francisco singing group that did the piece, have posted a new one–Version 1.1–that it hopes is copyright safe.
They have a full list of credits here and also on the video, and have a blog post on the problems related to the music video here.
Here’s the new version of “Bubble”:
The popular and viral video was removed from YouTube after photographer Lane Hartwell filed a DMCA take-down request with YouTube over copyright issues related to a photograph she took of Valleywag’s Owen Thomas that was used in the first video without her permission or credit.
Now, the Thomas picture has been replaced by one of, um, me. (At its start, the video also uses a quote from BoomTown’s interview with investor Peter Thiel, which you can watch in its entirety here.)
Hartwell has responded to the new video here, saying she was sending the Richter Scales an invoice for the first version of their video (apparently, it got a million plays on YouTube).
She said she would use the money to pay for her lawyer and donate the rest to Kids With Cameras, a nonprofit organization that teaches the art of photography to marginalized children in communities around the world. Hartwell said this was the offer “I proposed to the Richter Scales that they chose to disregard.”
Hartwell also noted, in part: “In the end, the band opted not to work with me toward a fair resolution of the issue. I have to say that I’m very disappointed with the members of the band I negotiated with in good faith. I question whether they would have acted differently if they’d been contacted by Billy Joel’s management or the stock photo agency Getty Images.”
The video is indeed using Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” as the tune in its parody.
