This Whole Mess With Ajit Pai, The Harlem Shake And Copyright Is Bad And Everyone's Wrong.

This is one of those frustrating stories where basically everyone's wrong about everything. Here's how it started: Just prior to Ajit Pai's FCC officially dumping net neutrality rules last week, the Daily Caller released a video with Pai. Pai seems to have a way of not realizing just how incredibly unfunny, tone-deaf and cringeworthy his "jokes" are -- but it doesn't stop him from trying again. If you somehow missed it, you can see the video here:

The video is bad and dumb and misleading and, yes, very, very cringeworthy. The pure awfulness of the video is what got people worked up initially, with Pai's supporters gleefully laughing at Pai's opponents for getting upset about it. If you can't see it for some reason, it involves Pai claiming that nothing is going to change on the internet following his bad decision to kill the FCC's net neutrality rules, and then attempts to show some examples: posting images of food and dogs to the internet, doing some online shopping, being a dorky Star Wars fan and, finally, "ruining a meme."

That meme? The Harlem Shake. If you were online in 2013, you almost certainly remember it. Because it was everywhere. For a couple months or so, everyone on the internet seemed to feel it was their obligation to create a video showing people crazy dancing to a snippet of the song "Harlem Shake" by "Baauer" the stage name of a music producer named Harry Rodrigues. The song, the Harlem Shake uses a sample from another song, Miller Time, by Philadelphia's Plastic Little. Also, the "con los terroristas" line was sampled from a singer named Hector Delgado.

Back in 2013, we actually had a few stories about copyright issues around the whole Harlem Shake phenomenon. First, we noted that Baauer and his label, Mad Decent, seemed to have engaged in selective enforcement of whatever copyright they might have held on the song. They left most videos live on, but did take down some from people they disagreed with. We also noted that the whole meme went viral not for anything that Baauer actually did, but because of the first few videomakers whose crazy videos turned it into a thing. Finally, we noted that Delgado and Plastic Little were demanding their cut as well.

And, of course, we should note that the whole Harlem Shake meme came and went pretty fast. I mean days after it went big, it was already declared dead. And, yes, this was part of the lame Pai joke.

Onto outrage two: soon after everyone was complaining about how awful (and inappropriate) this video was, some people noticed that one of the women dancing in the Ajit Pai Harlem Shake video... was a conspiracy theorist Pizzagater. Which, you know, is not really a good look for the freaking Chairman of the FCC (especially while making fun of people who are concerned about the future of the internet).

Outrage three: we're back to copyright. Baauer tweeted angrily that he supported net neutrality and was "taking action" saying "whatever I can do to stop this loser."

He also gave a statement to Billboard:

"The use of my song in this video obviously comes as a surprise to me as it was just brought to my attention. I want to be clear that it was used completely without my consent or council. My team and I are currently exploring every single avenue available to get it taken down. I support Net Neutrality like the vast majority of this country and am appalled to be associated with its repeal in anyway."

So, let's be clear why this is also bad. The use here is obv