Today in Campaign Fail

Today was supposed to be about Gov. Rick Perry versus the Tenth Amendment. Instead, it's become Perry versus copyright law – and copyright law has won.

Perry and his crew are up in Arlington, rambling on to the Texas Conservative Coalitionabout how the Tenth Amendment is really a get-out-of-jail-free card for Texas. However, while he's been happily misinterpreting that bit of the US Constitution, seems like someone has been cracking down on his campaign's lax grasp of using copyrighted material in web ads.

The first known problem reportedly came when it was discovered that Sufjan Stevens' Chicago was being used on a video on the LiberalBillWhite channel. That is (or rather was) an attack machine set up to go after Perry's Democratic challenger Bill White.

Unfortunately for Perry, seems like no-one bothered asking Stevens. It turned out that his publishing company was not impressed about this flagrant violation of copyright law. Nor, it seems, were the producers of Seinfeld happy about a clip of their show being used in another ad. It's unclear whether the creators of Liar Liar knew what was happening with their intellectual property, but that ad, the one where they stole footage from Starsky and Hutch (the bad remake) and others that used copyrighted material have now disappeared. Why? Because the account has been closed. According to the YouTube official notice:

This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated due to multiple third-party notifications of copyright infringement.

White's campaign manager Katy Bacon said, "Perry's suffering the consequences of his casual relationship with the law."

Perry campaign (mis)manager Mark Miner has told NBC5 in Dallas-Fort Worth that the videos will go up on their Liberal Bill campaign ad.

Er, you may wanna reconsider that, Mark.

Last December, Republican Party of Texas Communications Director Bryan Preston showed poor knowledge of copyright law when the GOP ripped off The Great Pretender by The Platters for another campaign ad. Sen. John McCain had to publicly apologize to singer and noted liberal Jackson Brown for stealing Running on Empty for a campaign ad. Then there was the classic "did you listen to the lyrics?" moment of Pres. Ronald Reagan misappropriating Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA.

The problem for the GOP here is that there is no legal argument to be made for ripping off people's stuff for campaign ads. Period. If they do press on, in spite of all the legal precedent and being kicked off of YouTube, Perry better hope that campaign war chest he's been accessing so freely can turn into a legal fund.

So much, it seems, for Perry's oft-repeated claim that he's trying to keep Texas business-friendly. Intellectual property law is a bedrock of modern commerce. Ignore that, and what does that really say about his respect for the business community?