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Trump Campaign Uses 'Dark Knight' Music In Campaign Ad, Warner Bros. Says It's Looking At Legal Options

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Every political campaign season, which now apparently perpetually overlap and place us all in a never ending and hellish new reality, we always end up hearing about supposed copyright infringement by political campaigns. These claims typically involve music that accompanies candidates at public events, and the claims typically are misguided, as campaigns usually get a blanket license for this music. Still, more recently, we've also seen the occasional use of music by a campaign that actually does appear to be infringement, as both Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee have found themselves having to defend their use of music on the trail. As you keep that history in your head, place it directly next to the rather infamous view Donald Trump has taken on intellectual property in general, and even on how his campaign has used it jealously in particular.And then read about how the Trump 2020 campaign decided to release a campaign video that just flat out used music from The Dark Knight for some reason.

President Trump’s latest 2020 campaign video was removed from Twitter Tuesday night after Warner Brothers Entertainment requested it be taken down due to the use of music from “The Dark Knight Rises'” score in the clip.“The use of Warner Bros.’ score from ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ in the campaign video was unauthorized,” a Warner Brothers spokesperson said in a statement before the removal. “We are working through the appropriate legal channels to have it removed.”The two-minute video not only utilized Hans Zimmer’s “Why Do We Fall?” from the 2012 threequel, but also shared the font used for the film’s title cards.
What makes this all interesting is, again, Donald Trump's and his family's long history of IP use, enforcement, and their willingness to wield litigation as a cudgel. It seems hypocritical for the Trump campaign to bandy about using well-known movie scores in a campaign advertisement. It's also plainly understandable why Warner Bros. wouldn't want to be seen as backing any particular candidate by remaining silent on the use of its music. While we regularly rail against silly takedowns over copyright, this one seems to make sense.Or, if you are to believe Trump's campaign manager, Brad Parscale, this is all somehow CNN's fault.
Now, if you think that tweet makes even a modicum of sense, I... just... no. AT&T does indeed own Warner Bros., and CNN too, but it takes more mental yoga than I'm capable of to somehow twist the mind into believing that a takedown of obvious copyright infringement is somehow to do with a parent company's ownership over a long-standing cable news company.Maybe just don't hypocritically slap a movie's soundtrack onto a campaign ad?

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Investor Lawsuit Accuses AT&T Of Downplaying Streaming Video Losses

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So we've noted how AT&T's latest round of merger mania isn't providing quite the returns the company expected. After spending $67 billion to buy DirecTV and another $86 billion to acquire Time Warner, AT&T had hoped to become a juggernaut in the internet video and online advertising space. But those efforts haven't gone quite according to plan. The company has been losing both traditional TV (DirecTV, IPTV) and streaming video (DirecTV Now) customers at an alarming rate, thanks largely due to AT&T price hikes imposed to try and recoup the massive debt load AT&T acquired during its fit of merger mania.A new lawsuit (pdf) is now complicating AT&T's ambitions further. The lawsuit, filed last week in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses AT&T executives like CEO Randall Stephenson of violating the US Securities Act by "knowingly or recklessly" making false statements to investors by failing to disclose that the company's DirecTV Now streaming platform wasn't doing all that well.More specifically, the lawsuit accuses AT&T of issuing press releases, filings, and other public statements that actively downplayed or omitted the fact that the company's streaming customers were headed for the exits (267,000 in Q4 alone), in large part thanks to several rounds of rate hikes on the company's DirecTV Now streaming platform.The firm backing the lawsuit focuses specifically on the June 2018 registration statement issued in connection with the stock issuance during the Time Warner Merger, which proclaimed that the losses AT&T was seeing on the traditional TV front (DirecTV) weren't that big of a deal because they'd be offset by growth at the company's new streaming service. Omitted was the fact that price hikes were actually driving subscribers away, resulting in the company's stock taking a notable dive when the collective video losses were formally announced in October of 2018:

"AT&T's registration statement touted yearly and quarterly growth trends... including quarterly subscriber gains in its DirecTV Now service sufficient to offset any decrease in traditional satellite DirecTV subscribers, such that AT&T was experiencing an ongoing trend of total video subscriber 'net additions,'" the complaint said.But in reality, "DirecTV Now subscribers were leaving (i.e., not renewing) as soon as their promotional discount periods expired, while at the same time new potential DirecTV Now customers were unwilling to pay the higher prices and therefore not subscribing at all," the complaint said. By the time AT&T bought Time Warner, "AT&T's reported 'net additions' growth trend was already reversing into a severe 'net loss.'"
Like Verizon, AT&T had hoped to pivot from stodgy old telco to sexy new online Millennial advertising juggernaut. But also like Verizon, AT&T executives tend to have a worldview crafted by decades as a government-pampered monopoly, resulting in market behaviors that don't always make sense in context. Like hiking prices on your new streaming service in the wake of soaring video competition (despite having just received a $20 billion tax cut), for example. Or buying a satellite TV provider on the eve of the cord cutting revolution, as another example.All told, consumers are pissed at AT&T because of rate hikes and the company's frontal assault on net neutrality. Competitors are pissed at AT&T because it immediately began using its Time Warner acquisition as a weapon to drive up the cost of "must have" channels like HBO. And investors are pissed because these deals were supposed to revolutionize AT&T's business, not result in soaring debt and subscriber declines. All in all, not quite the televised revolution AT&T had promised anybody in the chain.

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