Yesterday, President Donald Trump‘s uploaded a bizarre video to his Twitter account including various footage of himself edited together with a selection of Hans Zimmer’s score from The Dark Knight Rises. Turns out that the use of the score was unauthorized, prompting Warner Bros. Pictures to file a copyright claim. That claim was successful — the video has since been removed.
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According to BuzzFeed, the video was taken down sometime Tuesday night and now, the whole Tweet itself — Trump had shared the video with the caption “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” — is gone as well, having been previously pinned to the top of the feed.
If you didn’t see the video prior to its removal, here’s a general summary. The two-minute video showed clips of Trump meeting with foreign dignitaries such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro intercut with footage of a range of prominent liberals, including President Barack Obama, the Clintons, as well as Amy Schumer and Rosie O’Donnell. Backing it all was a piece from The Dark Knight Rises score — “Why Do We Fall”.
“First they ignore you,” the video reads. “Then they laugh at you, then they call you racist.”
It’s not entirely clear where the video originated from — BuzzFeed notes that it appears to have been taken from a YouTube video that was shared to a Reddit forum. The video has since been taken down from YouTube as well. Whatever its original origin, it quickly went viral after Trump shared it, prompting the Warner Bros. response.
“The use of Warner Bros.’ score from The Dark Knight Rises in the campaign video was unauthorized,” a Warner Bros. spokesperson said on Tuesday night. “We are working through the appropriate legal channels to have it removed.”
The odd video isn’t the first time that Trump has gotten less-than-positive attention for his use co-opting of elements of popular culture. Back in November, Trump took to Twitter with a Game of Thrones-themed message regarding sanctions he was planning to impose on Iran. That post featured an image of the president with text reading “Sanctions are Coming” in the same font used by Game of Thrones — an obvious reference to the “Winter is Coming” tagline used by the HBO series. That post didn’t quite go over that well with HBO — they responded with a pretty clever tweet of their own: the media company tweeted “How do you say trademark misuse in Dothraki” to Twitter at the time.
What do you think about the unusual video being taken down due to copyright misuse? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
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