One of my favorite bits of Internet art is Rainbowstep, a 2011 mashup of Skrillex and My Little Pony. It’s beautifully edited and something about the intense music and visuals never fails to evoke a strong emotional response in me.

But that link is to a crappy re-encoded copy some generous random person put online. The original video is offline with no explanation. I did a bit of digging in the Wayback Machine and it looks to have been taken offline in 2016 or 2017 on a copyright complaint by Warner Music Group, Skrillex’s corporate overlord. No idea why YouTube no longer displays the takedown notice; maybe a bug.

Fuck that! Imagine being a kid who grew up with this video. You go to look it up and revisit some of your culture and it’s just gone. OK sure the music was basically a full unlicensed copy of Skrillex’ song plus many unlicensed clips from the TV show. Yes, current copyright law means legally that video is on shaky ground. But the work as a whole had so much more art in it than those pieces, it offends me a company can just unilaterally destroy it.

FWIW the artist of the video is Zesstra Howkon, aka ZestyArt or Dastrun. Their video page on Youtube is now empty, all of their work is gone.