Parody pooper
Tech business site TechCrunch has spotted a major threat to one of the more amusing user-generated trends to appear on the web - Hitler's not happy.
It goes like this: Downfall is a German-language film released in 2004 that documents the final days of Hitler's life towards the end of the Second World War. As you would expect, Adolf is not a happy camper during this time and the stress and despair he went through is crystallised in a scene in his bunker when a bunch of his senior staff tell him things are not going well and he loses the plot.
Serious, sombre stuff you might think, but imagine if you replaced the original subtitles with something much more mundane. What you have then is comedy gold.
In the past few years, a number of YouTube users have done just that, often picking technology issues like the launch of a new product, or just some piece of current affairs, and making it look like Hitler himself is apoplectic about this development.
But it looks like Constantin Films, who own the rights to Downfall, are themselves not happy about their material being appropriated in this way and have started asking YouTube to take the clips down.
While we don't question the right of anyone to defend their intellectual property from appropriation online, but it seems a shame that Constantin has chosen to take this stand. It's a bit of light-hearted fun that nobody is profiting from as far as we can tell, and it's providing publicity for the film that it would otherwise not have had.
Inevitably there are already Hitler parodies going up on YouTube mocking Constantin's decision. We won't embed an specific ones here as they may well be taken down soon, but here's a ‘Hitler parody' playlist created nine months ago, from which some clips are still available to watch. Warning, there will be rude words.
