Warner Bros. Gets Trump Video Pulled From Twitter

Campaign clip yanked after Warner Bros. complains about use of 'Dark Knight Rises' music
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Apr 10, 2019 7:48 AM CDT
Trump Learns He Can't Lift Batman Content for Campaign
In this file photo, Christian Bale portrays Batman in a scene from "The Dark Knight Rises."   (AP PHoto/Warner Bros., File)

President Trump posted a 2020 campaign video on Twitter late Tuesday afternoon, and in just a few hours it racked up more than a million views, per BuzzFeed. But if you haven't seen it by now, you may not get to anytime soon, as legal action from Warner Bros. has had it taken down, Variety reports. The problem: The two-minute clip—which promoted Trump's first two years in office, alongside clips that painted prominent liberals like former President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Amy Schumer in a negative light—used Hans Zimmer's "Why Do We Fall?" from The Dark Knight Rises as its background music. At one point in the video, the following text was displayed: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they call you racist."

"The use of Warner Bros.' score from 'The Dark Knight Rises' in the campaign video was unauthorized," the company says in a statement. BuzzFeed, which notes the Trump promo seems to have originated from a YouTube video posted on a Reddit thread (and the site isn't sure if that video received permission to use the Zimmer score), reports Warner Bros. filed a copyright infringement complaint to get the video yanked. Now, the president's tweet that originally had the video embedded under the caption "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!" simply notes, "This media has been disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner." It's not the first time Trump has irritated a major entertainment company thusly: The president has also been taken to task by HBO for appropriating content from Game of Thrones for memes. (More President Trump stories.)

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