I ran across an interesting lawsuit.  A woman posted a video of her 13 month old dancing to Let's Go Crazy by Prince on YouTube.  The quality of the video was poor and you can barely hear the song.  Yet, Universal Studios contacted YouTube and told them to take the video down because of copyright infringement on the Prince song.  Hear is an article discussing the case.  The YouTube video is below.

This is an interesting question.  The question is whether the video is a violation of copyright or an extension of fair use.  It seems like a stretch to suggest that this video is going to somehow impact the copyright holder.  The audio quality is poor at best and it certainly is not going to impact album sales. It will be curious to see the outcome because it could have a broad impact. 

The bigger question is what right do you as the owner of a CD or album have to the content?  Clearly copying the CD and giving it to all of your friends is violation, but what about a mix tape?  (I think that this is covered under fair use.)  What if you want to use it as a background for a family video which is the case here.  The driver is that it is now so easy to publish videos and other content on the Internet.  I believe that fair use should apply to the video just as it does do the other personal uses mentioned.

Here is the video:

I was recently perusing the Internet and ran into the YouTube video below.  It is very cool and my immediate thought is "How does this guy have the time and money to do all of this?"  Regardless, his time and money is our gain.  This is just a very cool video and it is kind of uplifting.  Perhaps it is just the simple act of dancing with all of the various people in the around the world.

Update: I found another site that has a high definition version of this video.  Even better althought quite bandwidth intensive.  It choked on my wireless and worked fine on my wired connection.  (As I posted in the past, my downstream bandwidth is actually quite good.)  Here is the URL: http://www.vimeo.com/1211060?pg=embed&sec=1211060&hd=1