The ad was a bit of payback for an Obama campaign spot. | POLITICO Screengrab Obama YouTube clips yanked, too

A day after forcing YouTube to pull a Mitt Romney campaign ad featuring a snippet of Barack Obama singing Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” a major music publisher is doing likewise with videos of the president’s crooning.

Romney’s ad disappeared Monday, and the Obama clips — shot at a January fundraiser at the Apollo Theater in Harlem — began coming down Tuesday.


The ad, titled “Political Payoffs and Middle-Class Layoffs,” was meant to highlight how Obama campaign donors have thrived over the past 3½ years while many Americans continue to struggle with the down economy. It was also a bit of payback: A new Obama campaign ad uses an extended clip of Romney singing “America the Beautiful.”

That Obama ad is safe from attempts to pull it down. Since “America the Beautiful” was published before 1923, it’s in the public domain.

BMG Rights Management, one of the world’s largest music publishing companies, filed a request with YouTube to pull the ad down under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A Romney spokesman told the Huffington Post their use of “Let’s Stay Together” qualified as fair use, and said the campaign would work to get the ad back up.

( Also on POLITICO: Clinton: Romney ads 'waste of money')

At least one prominent tech blog agreed with the Romney team’s assessment.

“The Romney ad seems like as clear-cut a case of fair use as can be imagined,” Timothy B. Lee wrote at Ars Technica. “Obama’s singing is a core part of the ad’s message, and copyright law explicitly mentions commentary and criticism as justifications for fair use. And it’s hard to imagine the ad harming the market for Al Green CDs or iTunes tracks.”

The Romney team can appeal YouTube’s decision to pull the ad, Lee writes, but the video-sharing site must wait at least 10 days before putting the ad back up. “In a campaign where the news cycle is measured in hours, 10 days is an eternity,” Lee writes.

While the Romney and Obama clips have been pulled, Mike Masnick at TechDirt points out multiple clips of Green singing the song are still available.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated the nature of BMG’s business. It is a music publisher.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: Andrea Drusch @ 07/17/2012 03:09 PM CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated the nature of BMG’s business. It is a music publisher.