The Ironies Of Linkin Park And Donald Trump In A Song

The most adversarial president in history discovers that there are limits to his power.

This morning, I saw a headline (inspiration!) that said that Linkin Park complained to Twitter that the Trump campaign had used a song in a campaign video without authorization from the songwriters. According to Variety Magazine, the Trump campaign had used music from Linkin Park’s song, “In The End” in a campaign video that had been posted on Twitter. Twitter removed the post from Trump’s Twitter account upon receipt of the complaint.

Where have I seen this before? Oh yeah. It was Neil Young lodging multiple complaints on Twitter against the Trump campaign for use of his songs. Trump has a habit of playing, “Rockin’ In The Free World” at his rallies as he walks onto the stage. Neil Young is not OK with this and they have filed complaints to restrain the Trump campaign from playing his music, anywhere, anytime, in support of Trump’s campaign. There is a supreme irony in the scene of Trump walking on stage to music performed by one of America’s favorite hippies.

Does Trump not understand the difference between public domain and copyright? You can bet that if someone used any copyrighted works of Donald Trump in anything that generates revenue, revenue, revenue! they’d be getting a cease and desist letter about it. It would have been nice if the Trump campaign had taken the time to get permission before playing the music at the rallies or dubbing it onto a campaign video.

In my research for this article, I found numerous complaints against the Trump campaign for copyright violations. Although most of the stories I found had followed a straightforward formula, here’s where he did the deed, here’s who complained, and look, they took it down, there was one story that took an entirely different tack. The Washington Times, that great patriotic bastion of scoundrels, ran the following headline, “Trump critics using copyright laws to target tweets”. Gasp! Trump critics are using copyright laws to censor, censor, censor! Trump. The lead paragraph in the Washington Times article sets the tone:

Where boycotts and allegations of inciting violence or hatred have failed to get Big Tech to silence President Trump, copyright complaints have proven to be a much more successful weapon.