As the article's author, Ben Walters, writes, beyond the surface humor, there's something interesting happening here:

sweded movies are a form of talking back to Hollywood. Along with recut trailers and "supercuts" of familiar tropes, they represent a fledgling digital moving-image culture that presents a radical challenge to the mainstream movie industry. They are created as fun for fans but the ideas of entitlement and agency underpinning these videos will shape how we all consume -- and produce -- moving images in the 21st century. They are a taste of what comes after Hollywood.

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Culture is not something reserved to an elite. No particular business or set of businesses and no particular business model should be protected from the winds of innovation and change in the name of preserving culture. A people’s culture is just that -- the people’s culture....

Initially Levine presents his book on the pending doom of American culture as an appeal really done on behalf of the financial interests of artists, writers, and musicians. (One might be forgiven for skepticism and for asking where was/is Levine on the issue of IP corporate establishment exploitation of African American and other marginalized artists who have been pillaged by those entities for more than a century.)

Of course “protecting struggling artists” is only the cover story. Levine actually knows what many other Americans realize–that most artists are trapped in contractual peonage with their corporate distributers and that they often retain no property interests capable of being ravaged by third-party pirates.

Levine utterly ignores creative and impactful and socially desirable user-generated material such as the insertion into a picture of Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” a still from the video of a policeman nonchalantly pepper spraying demonstrators engaging in the Occupy movement. Such works make statements and connect people culturally in ways Levine apparently does not value and would stop....

.... The constitutional grant of power to Congress to regulate copyrights and patents explicitly states that the purpose of such laws is to benefit the public. Innovation is to insure progress for everyone, not merely wealth for a few. The Internet may indeed be destroying the culture business, or at least some of it in its entrenched form, but it is not destroying culture. Intellectual property law is not designed to be, never has been intended to be, and must not be allowed to become the footservant of moneyed erstwhile overlords.

Creative industries tend to be like clubs. You can get into the club in many ways, but all of them are equally difficult. You've put the time in, done the training, had the lucky breaks, struggled and finally made it. Once you are actually in the club then life is easier. You have a name, you are a part of a network and you work with a lot of the same people year in year out. Members rarely fall out of the club entirely...

We are pros. We are "in". And we are aware that there are so many more people who are not "in" that would like to be.

Perhaps they have an overly-romantic notion of what it's like but that's just how it is. All creative fields, from modern art through to advertising have that lustre because people like the idea of making things for a living.

[P]art of being "in" is the sense that the club can't get too big, and for many the internet is actually pushing to make the club smaller. Book publishers, for example, no longer offer much in the way of advances. Long-tail services like Netflix and Spotify have such huge libraries that every new artist is competing not just with their peers, but their antecedents also. Distribution may rise but prices fall.

They feel squeezed by piracy. Though they dislike it, many who are "in" quietly believe that they have to keep many more people "out" in order to hold on to what remains. I don't mean executives etc. I mean established writers, musicians, game makers and so on. We live in a curious age where the freest of thinkers (artists of various stripes) are the ones that want to curtail freedom the most.

Those who are "in" also feel squeezed by something else: Democratisation of tools. It's bad enough that they have to deal with a loss of revenue, but a reduction of difficulty in getting into the club threatens to increase its size many times over. The future is a world awash with low-rent ebooks, GarageBand music and GameMaker-developed games. Quality will collapse, and there will be no future for the professional any more.

In the startup world, the reduction of barriers is a great boon. You can, for example, assemble a small team and go create a tool that will change the world. As an individual you can create a blog that causes conversations and change. You can develop a game, make music, start a design agency, and all you need is a laptop.

It's not amateur in the sense of a lack of diligence, nor is it professional in the sense of those who are "in". The forces of technology distribution and cheap or free tools creates a space for talent to do what talent wants to do. It creates a class of pro-amateur makers.

A pro-amateur perhaps works on a project as a side-line to her day-job but she treats it seriously. Like any struggling writer, there is the work and the need to pay the rent. The difference is that the pro-amateur then takes her work and distributes it directly. She creates a book, an album, a TV series and just puts it out there. It only really costs her time to do it, and if it works it works. If not, she does something else.

The magic of the internet is therefore this: It substitutes time spent getting into the club with time spent finding fans. Expertise with experience. Legitimacy with audience. Jargon with generosity. And for those with the talent to do it well come the rewards because niche audiences that blossom into tribes exist for almost anything you can think of.

At first glance, David Hobby looks like just another casualty of the decline of print media: A longtime staff photographer for the Baltimore Sun, he was one of many employees who accepted a buyout in 2008 as part of broad staff reductions at the distressed newspaper.

Yet last month he embarked on a sold-out, cross-country tour that will visit 29 cities. Approximately $1 million in tickets have been sold for the privilege of hearing Hobby and famed magazine photographer Joe McNally speak about their craft. Hobby's blog, Strobist, on which he teaches amateurs the lighting techniques used by professionals, welcomed 2 million unique visitors last year.

McNally doesn't see anything demeaning in sharing his insights with thousands of amateurs; rather, he says he's come to enjoy teaching. "If you encounter passion, you have to counter it with your own passion," he says. "Even if, at the end of the day, you feel they're not going to go out the next day and climb the Empire State Building."

That sentiment is alien to the old guard in the professional photography world, where, Hobby says, "there's a lot of information-hoarding, and [a sense that] if I teach this person how to do this, he'll become my competition." Once the dust settles from all the change he's helped bring about, Hobby thinks there will still be legitimate careers for professional photographers. "You'll have fewer rock stars, and a much larger middle class," he says, a group of photographers who will find ways to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack.

First, would you trust a citizen neurosurgeon to remove your kid's neuroblastoma? No, you wouldn't. You would not trust a citizen dentist either for your cavities. Or even a people's car repairman.

On the face of it, that's an incredibly stupid thing to say, and is amazingly offensive to the vast majority of people in the world who are creative amateurs.

Note: I did not say "the vast amount of creative people in the world who are amateurs", though this would also be true. Most people in the world do creative things for no money. The vast majority of music in the world is made for cultural reasons that are not economic. To suggest that the only reason to be creative is with the expectation of payment is utterly offensive.

Beyond stupidity
But it's not just stupid and offensive -- it's corrupt. It's so manifestly and obviously false that it could not possibly be the considered belief of a rational human being.

The alternative (and indeed, the only plausible conclusion) is that it's a deliberate falsehood in order to support something that is utterly indefensible when examined with any intellectual honesty.

It's the direct result of corporate lobbying, it's entirely disingenuous, and it's a bald-faced lie echoed to support the interests of powerful and moneyed multinational organisations.

The shuttering of Gourmet reminds us that in a click-or-die advertising marketplace, one ruled by a million instant pundits, where an anonymous Twitter comment might be seen to pack more resonance and useful content than an article that reflects a lifetime of experience, experts are not created from the top down but from the bottom up. They can no longer be coronated; their voices have to be deemed essential to the lives of their customers. That leaves, I think, little room for the thoughtful, considered editorial with which Gourmet delighted its readers for almost seven decades.

To survive, those of us who believe that inexperience rarely leads to wisdom need to swim against the tide, better define our brands, prove our worth, ask to be paid for what we do, and refuse to climb aboard this ship of fools, the one where everyone has an equal voice. Google "broccoli casserole" and make the first recipe you find. I guarantee it will be disappointing. The world needs fewer opinions and more thoughtful expertise -- the kind that comes from real experience, the hard-won blood-on-the-floor kind. I like my reporters, my pilots, my pundits, my doctors, my teachers and my cooking instructors to have graduated from the school of hard knocks.

What makes this case unique is the lively debate that it has prompted, which will likely impact how this action and similar infringement cases will be prosecuted and defended going forward. Within days of the suit's initiation, the popular Web site YouTube was inundated with postings in which fans freely offered their opinions concerning the merits of Satriani's claims (or absence there-of). Some of these submissions were supported by surprisingly detailed analyses of the works.

The parties should take note of the prior art works that have surfaced as part of the public debate. Such works could prove to be helpful to Coldplay in defending against Satriani's claims, as they could reflect that Satriani himself may have "unconsciously copied" from an earlier work.

Or [prior art] may simply reflect these oft-quoted words from the Second Circuit: "It must be remembered that, while there are an enormous number of possible permutations of the musical notes of the scale, only a few are pleasing; and much fewer still suit the infantile demands of the popular ear. Recurrence is not therefore an inevitable badge of palgiarism." Darrell v. Joe Morris Music Corp., 113 F.2d 80, 80 (2d Cir. 1940)

What makes the Internet commentary regarding the two songs particularly interesting is that much of it replicates the type of expert analysis that both sides will likely use if the case goes forward. In music copyright infringement cases, it is rare for parties to rely solely on bare assertions of copying or independent creation. Instead, they frequently engage "musicology" experts to undertake detailed analyses of every element of alleged similarity between the two works and conclude whether all or portions of one work were copied from the other. The parties and their experts in [this case] should consider the analyses of the "amateur musicologists" that have weighed in via the Internet and other media, if for no other reason than they may be informative of how a jury might ultimately view the case...

While Satriani v. Martin may not go to trial for a variety of reasons, it is clear that user-generated content sites like YouTube have the potential to alter the way music cases -- and other types of copyright case -- are developed. Because advances in technology allow the public to participate in real-time infringement debate, future parties would do well to monitor this "chatter" as it could uncover evidence and theories that may be helpful to the case of the copyright owner, the alleged infringer or both.

The web is in trouble. Last week craigslist, a vast classified-ads site, had to abandon its "erotic services" category because of claims that it was an "online brothel" being used by sexual predators.

And in France L'Oreal discovered eBay could not be forced to stop selling cheap knock-offs of its products.

After British villages rose up against the intrusion of Google's Street View, Greece has banned the mobile camera cars that put pictures of people's homes and streets on the internet

Privacy campaigners fear the power of Google and the online ad company Phorm to gather and exploit personal information. They invade your computer, monitor your web-browsing and buying, check where you are and then bombard you with targeted hard sells.

"The internet", says David Edgerton, professor of the history of technology at Imperial College London and author of The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, "is rather passe . . . It's just a means of communication, like television, radio or newspapers."

One great promise of web 2.0 was that it would lead to a post-industrial world in which everything was dematerialised into a shimmer of electrons. But last year's oil price shock and this year's recession, not to mention every year's looming eco-catastrophe, show that we are still utterly dependent on the heavy things of the old economy.

So what, if not everything, will the web change? The key feature of web 2.0 that is currently driving change is its intense focus on the individual.

Blogging, tweeting and Facebooking all give the individual the unprecedented opportunity to blather to the entire world.

The first objection to this is that it destroys institutions and structures that can do so much more than the individual.

The Wall Street Journal carried an analysis that is still the best thing I have seen on the subject. But the story needed half a dozen qualified financial journalists to put it together, and masses of research that no lonely blogger could possibly do . . . This throws into relief the intractable fact that the liberty which the web offers to the individual voice is also a restriction on group effort.

Institutions -- publishers, newspapers, museums, universities, schools -- exist precisely because they can do more than individuals. If web 2.0 flattens everything to the level of whim and self-actualisation, then it will have done more harm than good.

A further objection to the cult's radical individualism is that it doesn't have the intended hyper-democratic consequences. Wikipedia, for example, has tackled inaccuracy and subversion by introducing forms of authority and control that would seem to be anathema to its founding ideals.

Bloggery is forming itself into big, institutionalised aggregators such as The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, and remains utterly parasitic on the mainstream media it affects to despise.

Even Twitter is already coming to be dominated by conventional, non-web-based celebrity -- Oprah Winfrey in the US and Stephen Fry over here.

The slightly more sinister aspect of this is that excessive individualism leads with astonishing rapidity to slavish conformity. The banking crisis may not have been caused by the internet but it was certainly fuelled by the way connectivity and speed created a market in which everybody was gripped by the hysteria of the herd.

Or there is the weird phenomenon of flash mobs. People agree by text message or tweet to assemble in one place and, suddenly, do so. This was originally intended as a joke or art piece designed to demonstrate sheep-like conformity, but it rapidly became an aspect of cultish libertarianism. It doesn't work. Flash mobs in Russia are simply prevented by cutting off mobile-phone coverage. Old-world politics is more powerful than the web.

And, finally, the everything-free, massively deflationary effects of the web may be over. Rupert Murdoch, head of The Sunday Times's parent company, has said he is thinking of charging for online versions of his papers. The hard fact that somebody, somehow, has to pay for all this is breaking into web heaven.

Andrew Keen predicts an end to backyard gardens, playground basketball, basement jam sessions, amateur painting, and open mic nights for the duration of the economic hard times, because "the idea of free labor will suddenly become profoundly unpalatable to someone faced with their house being repossessed or their kids going hungry."

Oh, wait. Hold on. He only predicts an end to unpaid-but-pleasurable labor on the Internet

"One of the very few positive consequences of the current financial miasma will be a sharp cultural shift in our attitude toward the economic value of our labor. Mass unemployment and a deep economic recession comprise the most effective antidote to the utopian ideals of open-source radicals."

The altruistic ideal of giving away one's labor for free appeared credible in the fat summer of the Web 2.0 boom when social-media startups hung from trees, Facebook was valued at $15 billion, and VCs queued up to fund revenue-less "businesses" like Twitter. But as we contemplate the world post-bailout, when economic reality once again bites, only Silicon Valley's wealthiest technologists can even consider the luxury of donating their labor to the latest fashionable, online, open-source project.

"So how will today's brutal economic climate change the Web 2.0 "free" economy? It will result in the rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash.

"It will mean the success of Knol over Wikipedia, Mahalo over Google, TheAtlantic.com over the HuffingtonPost.com, iTunes over MySpace, Hulu over YouTube Inc. , Playboy.com over Voyeurweb.com, TechCrunch over the blogosphere, CNN's professional journalism over CNN's iReporter citizen-journalism.

"Arrington's stance, of course, epitomizes the permissive attitude about intellectual property that has already destroyed the music business and is now threatening to kill the holy trinity that includes Hollywood, the television industry, and the book trade."

In 1999, when Napster first assaulted the recorded music industry with its peer-to-peer technology, we heard similarly open-minded nonsense from Web 1.0 moguls like MP3.com founder Michael Robertson and Public Enemy's Chuck D. Almost 10 years later, the catastrophic consequences of Napster's mass piracy are all too tragically evident. In 1997, global recorded music sales were $45 billion. By next year, it is estimated that they will have fallen to around $23 billion -- an almost 50 percent drop in sales in a little more than a single decade.

"The truth, of course, is that the theft of digital content is no more "natural" than holding up little old ladies on street-corners or crashing civilian airliners into tall buildings. And it's the responsibility of thought-leaders like Arrington to use their privileged positions to educate the innocent about the evils of digital thievery."

• Error 1: Calling infringement "theft."
• Error 2: Saying that it's irresponsible for someone who notices that the majority of the population is breaking a law to suggest that perhaps it's time to rethink that law.
• Error 3: Suggesting actions done by the majority of the population is the equivalent of the 9/11 hijackers.
• Error 4: Saying that any "thought-leader" has a "responsibility" to take a particular stand
• Error 5: Saying that infringement is a problem of "innocents" run wild.
• Error 6: Putting a moral angle ("evil") on an issue that is merely one of business models

By stating his opposition to criminalizing "natural behavior," Arrington is not only legitimizing online theft, but he is also undermining the credibility of entertainment companies, such as Hulu or Blinkbox that have invested major resources into building entirely legal Web businesses. Defending YouTube's flagrant disregard for intellectual property laws is tantamount to justifying criminal behavior....