Queen Rania and copyright

Recently I have learned that the Jordanian Queen Rania has a YouTube channel.  You are welcome to check it out,  because it is rather interesting and is well done.

Officially the channel is dedicated to “breaking down stereotypes about the Arab and Muslim worlds and to bridging the East-West divide” and I am really curious how well it works from the queen’s point of view.  On the one hand, the comments on the channel page are not really constructive (to say the least).  On the other hand, I think that the content reflects a rather innovative approach to this sensitive topic and it is yet another example of different model for a leader communicating with her followers.  To a degree, it can be another chapter in my post about Obama not being the first leader to embrace the new media (Rania launched her channel about a year and a half ago).  I don’t mean this as a criticism of Obama.  On the contrary, I simply find this whole line of developments rather exciting.

The point of this post, however, is not just providing another example to the “Obama Effect“.  There was another something curious I’ve noticed while exploring Queen Rania’s channel.  It was actually about copyright…

My attention to the channel was brought by the Youtube channel of the Israeli TV Channel 2 (so many “channel” in one sentence :).  They aired a report about Rania winnig YouTube award for this inititiative and used her spoof of Letterman’s Top 10 while accepting the award at YouTube Live.  As I said, it was really well done and caught my attention, so I went on to check out the original.  I watched the same spoof again on the royal channel, but for some reason, not all the jokes worked for me.

Let’s see if you can spot the differences:

Here is the Channel 2 report (it is in Hebrew, but the actual video from Rania’s channel is English, so I think everybody can understand:

And here is the current version of the video on the official channel of Queen Rania:

If I watched it correctly, the scenes from Madonna’s clip and from 24 are now removed from the video.  I think particularly, the Madonna joke does not work without the visual.  My guess is that these scenes were removed due to the copyright rules YouTube are trying to enforce on the website.  I find it really fascinating.  It looks like even roaylties are subject to copyright wars.  I think it is interesting in itself.