Thursday, May 6, 2010

The Reason Why The Main Trailer Has Been Taken Down

Someone from Beggars Group in NYC said we owed them an undisclosed about of money for the use of a 12 second clip of Girls "Lust for Life" in the preview. I was drunk when I shot the video and the audio was picked up accidentally. We (my co-director Eliseo and I) chose to use it in the preview because we thought it fit.

We don't want to violate intellectual rights in any way but we feel that there should be a certain leniency for use of copyrighted materials that do not make money. Even if an artistic work that 'samples' does make money, there can be some wiggle room for people who re-contextualize the work in a compelling way. Example: hip-hop.

Our film has never and will never make money. We will probably end of broke alcoholics. If we did make money, we would be happy to pay a percent of that money to Girls and to the "Master Owners" at Beggars/Matador.

We may or may not be able to afford to put the video back up. It seems it will cost some substantial amount of money. My contact at Beggars is talking to her lawyer.

Most of all, please support Girls. They are not really involved at all in this process because they're signed to True Panther, which is under Matador which is somehow related to Beggars in a way that is too complicated for me to understand. They are an amazing band, maybe my favorite band that is currently touring and recording.

xoxo
Erik

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This post has been updated to reflect my decreasing confusion about the corporate structure of Beggars USA. Also: apparently it IS a serious copyright violation to include a small portion of a copyrighted song (filed as background noise) on a Youtube video without consent, no matter how financially insignificant the video is. Also, XL UK had nothing to do with the free release of the Radiohead album. FYI. I have sent an apology to Beggars USA.