This letter shows how simply ludicrous copyright holders can be concerning their properties.  This letter was sent in 1996 to a Manuel J. Perez, who displayed on his MIT homepage an image including characters from the then-lucrative children’s series, Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.  The letter was sent by legal representatives of Saban Entertainment, Inc.

    I mention this letter because it displays a highly ridiculous side to the way that copyright holders will sometimes deal with new technologies, and specifically with internet culture.  Disregarding any quality of judgment, Saban sends a cease and desist order to a member of the world wide web who is certainly not, as they deem, practicing any “unfair competition.”

    In fact, at the very least all that Perez’s sit was doing was adding a very small amount of free advertising for the Power Rangers brand and intellectual property.  This is an oft-overlooked factor of the YouTube debate.  When a rogue parodist concocts a transformative trailer for The Shining, for instance, it has only a positive effect on our view of both Stanley Kubrick’s opus and even Peter Gabriel’s “Salisbury Hill.”

    Similarly, the media that I will sample could, upon a strike of popularity, only benefit all parties.