News: the architect of youtube parody videos speaks

News:
05-03-2008:
Just spotted this video and post:

Santeri Ojala, causing YouTube to shut down his account over the weekend. (The account used to be here.)

"I feel disappointed," said Ojala in an email exchange on Wednesday. "I am amazed that this kind of arbitrary censorship occurs in the free internet."

Ojala's popular videos poked harmless fun at famous guitar soloists by dubbing his own abhorrently bad strummings over rock concert footage. Ojala created nearly a dozen different parodies of world-famous ax slingers like Eric Clapton, Slash, Eddie Van Halen and Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Jake E. Lee. (See a video of Ojala performing alongside Slash after the jump. Slash is not one of the artists Ojala suspects filed a claim against his videos.) The videos often attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers.

Though a spokesperson at YouTube declined to name the artists involved, Ojala suspects Swedish guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen and solo guitarist Steve Vai. They "complained about the videos and YouTube pulled the plug," said Ojala.

Read more at the wired blog post