Downfall filmmakers want YouTube to take down Hitler spoofs

Constantin Films stepping up campaign to assert copyright

* Owen Bowcott
* The Guardian, Wednesday 21 April 2010


Earlier this year it was estimated that YouTube was hosting 68 re-subtitled versions of Adolf Hitler’s rant in the film Downfall.

Few film sequences lend themselves so readily to online parody as the German film Der Untergang (Downfall), which portrays Adolf Hitler's deranged rant against betrayal in his besieged Berlin bunker.

The clip has been replayed on YouTube and other sites millions of times, with the dictator's subtitles cunningly adapted to ridicule contemporary setbacks – usually of a less catastrophic nature.

But not, if the film's producers have their way, for much longer. Constantin Films, the company that made the 2004 movie, is stepping up its campaign to assert its copyright to the material and demand that the lampoons are taken down.

One of the earliest spoofs involved the sullen Nazi leader being given the typed-up football results and learning that Sheffield United has been relegated. "Now we will have to live with this injustice," the Führer fumes.

Other versions have the Swiss actor, Bruno Ganz, ranting at the news that Oasis is splitting up, that Usain Bolt has broken the 100 metre record, or on being banned from playing his Xbox Live.

This is not the first time that the German film company has tried to prevent viral videos spawning spin-offs across the web. Earlier this year it was estimated that there were 68 different adaptations posted on YouTube and other platforms.

"Until recently, Hitler was demonised and portrayed not as a human being but as the devil himself," remarked Daniel Erk, a German critic whose Hitler blog on the leftwing newspaper Taz is keeping track of the Führer's appearances in popular culture and the media, from advertisements to Google requests and the surface of toast.

It may have been Spike Milligan who pioneered the Nazi satire industry with his bestselling book Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall, but the internet , it appears, has enabled everyone to rerun history.

Downfall filmmakers want YouTube to take down Hitler spoofs | Technology | The Guardian

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This is a good demonstration of copyright eating its own tail. At no point does any of these spoofs claim original ownership of the movie, nore does it undermine sales by reproducing it for free. Thus nothing that copyright was intended to protect is threatened by this, any more than a kid in a Superman costume threatens that IP. But preventing them certainly ossifies our cultural landscape, reducing the kind of references we can make and enjoy. Culture itself is to a huge degree the making of symbolic references to shared information; that is the very stuff of wehich we assemble a shared identity.