The Des Moines Register Is Finally Understanding The Interweb

On Saturday, thanks to the awful flooding of Iowa, the Iowa Cubs played in front of zero fans in a 5-4 win over Nashville. The flooding has killed five, displaced thousands from their homes and caused millions of dollars in damage. Therefore, Black Heart Gold Pants, an Iowa football blog, posted a video the Des Moines Register had shot with flood footage, and encouraged readers to donate to the Red Cross. Then matters got weird.

It turns out that even though the Des Moines Register had posted the video on their site, with embed code, they threatened to sue the blog for embedding the video.

It has recently come to the attention of the Des Moines Register that you have improperly posted a video, the rights to which are held by The Register. A copy of your unauthorized use can be found at www.blackheartgoldpants.com/2008/6/15/552422/the-flood.

As the copyright owner of that video, The Des Moines Register has the exclusive right to its reproduction and distribution. We therefore ask that you immediately remove the posted article from your website and cease any and all further use of the material. Any continued posting or use will be considered willful copyright infringement.

If you do not take the steps outlined above, this matter will be turned over to our attorneys for further action.

It's worth repeating here: The paper provided the embed code with the video.

We contacted the paper, and it appears there might have been some confusion about how that whole embed thing works. A nice person named Chris Snider explained:

Sorry for the confusion on this. This was simply a case of our policy not being updated to reflect our technology (we just got the embed option a couple months ago). I contacted the original blog author and let them know it is perfectly OK to embed our videos on their site or any site.

Baby steps, people: Baby steps.

DES MOINES REGISTER SINKS DISASTER RELIEF [Black Heart Gold Pants]