Universal Music Publishing Group is getting more of a fight than it expected after sending DMCA takedown requests to a Tumblr blog called This Charming Charlie, which inserted Smiths lyrics into Peanuts comic-strip images. Its creator Lauren LoPrete revealed last week that UMPG had “started requesting posts be removed from This Charming Charlie”, but now she tells Vice that she has “received a flood of offers from lawyers to take the case pro-bono… mostly lawyers that specialise in internet law and online free speech which is really cool”. There’s certainly a legal grey area to be explored here around the length of the lyrics being used by LoPrete, and whether her use of them is transformative. Our first response was to wonder whether LoPrete, UMPG and the Peanuts rightsholders could find some way to work together, and possibly even commercialise the idea. Then we realised, dispiritingly, that this is probably crazy talk. To court!
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