Ozzy Osbourne’s “Bark at the Moon” is considered a pretty tough song to play perfectly in Guitar Hero. It’s not quite in the top ten, but it’s up there. That’s why one player was disappointed to find that YouTube’s automated copyright-protection system had taken down a video of him performing a coveted full combo on the song. Not to worry, though — he found a clever and hilarious way around the problem of copyrighted recordings: He just made all the guitar sounds with his mouth and reuploaded the video. Problem solved.
You’d think that after decades of failed anti-piracy campaigning, music and video-game companies would have realized that it makes zero sense to take down what amounts to a free, fanmade advertisement for their products. Instead, we have an impersonal system that indiscriminately erases fun and interesting things from the web (along with all the pirated music).
But sometimes restrictions breed creativity, and the workarounds humans use to escape the wrath of the machines end up being more interesting than the original videos.
