Surely you woke up this morning in a panic when you heard the news that Rebecca Black’s “Friday” had been pulled from YouTube, right? RIGHT?! I mean, who wasn’t just grief-stricken to learn that “Friday” had been pulled — on a Friday, no less (Oh the agonizing irony!) — and that all that you see when you go to the page where Black’s infamous video, which her people recently tried to charge $2.99 for people to view, had been residing and viewed over 100 million times was this…
But calm down everyone…”Friday” is on YouTube again. And this time, it’s in the form of a “Director’s Cut.” Oh boy! Apparently, all of this is the result of her record label — Ark Recording Factory, a vanity label — trying to claim the rights to the master recording of the song so they can charge people three bucks to watch her video, or something like that.
Reports the Daily Dot:
Everyone from People Magazine to Mashable is reporting that Rebecca Black’s career-launching music video was taken off YouTube following an apparent dispute between Black and Ark Music Factory, the obscure record label which originally produced it for her. The video was briefly offered as a $2.99 rental. Black said on Twitter she had “nothing to do” with the move to charge to watch the video, and tweeted that she was getting her manager and lawyer to take action.
Challenge apparently accepted by her legal team: The video says it’s offline “because of a copyright claim by Rebecca Black.” Sounds official! So the original video with hundreds of millions of views is offline. But a high-fidelity copy of “Friday” is still on YouTube under a channel maintained by RebeccaBlack4Real.
So is that really Black’s YouTube? So far, the singer and YouTube haven’t responded to tweeted requests for confirmation of the channel’s authenticity. And Rebecca Black’s official website oddly still embeds the original version which now displays a copyright warning. You’d think that she’d update her own site with the new version, if RebeccaBlack4Real is her actual YouTube channel.
Whew! That was a close one. Not sure the Internet would have ever been the same without the ray of sunshine Rebecca Black shot out of her as$ for all of us. In the event you want to relive memories from the first time “Friday” came into your life, or if you just hate yourself, you can watch the “Director’s Cut” of the song below…
As of right now it’s about as popular as the other video was…