NY Mets Rickrolled... But MLB Uses DMCA To Shut Down The Fun

from the never-gonna-give-you-up... dept

Rickrolling, the geek-inspired prank of tricking folks into watching a video of Rick Astley's pop hit "Never Gonna Give You Up," has been way too popular over the past few months, but looked like it was finally going to die a painful death thanks to NY Times' coverage and YouTube's April Fool's joke. But, apparently the fun was just getting started. The NY Mets have been running a contest to see what song will be played during the 8th inning of home games all season. While there were a bunch of preset choices, the Mets also left a write-in options -- leaving open the opportunity for Digg and Fark to "Rickroll the Mets."

And... it worked... sorta. Apparently, the write-in votes dominated the contests, but the Mets are backing out of the agreement. Instead of accepting the Astley song, they're playing it and a selection of other songs over the next few games to see which one gets the biggest fan reaction -- and will then use that song all year long. However, the Astley song got the home opener nod, and was played during the 8th inning of Tuesday's game.

Now here's where the story gets interesting. Digg celebrated the achievement by linking to a video on YouTube of the song playing. But the folks at MLB Advanced Media wasted absolutely no time at all in rushing out a DMCA notice to take the video down, suggesting that it wasn't a big fan of being Rickrolled. Of course, it wasn't fast enough for the video to be saved by others [ed: link removed]. And, of course, there were some fans at the ballpark who also recorded the Rickrolling live. Man, that's a lot of booing. While MLB shouldn't be able to take down those fan videos, given how MLB has claimed ownership over all sorts of stuff, I wouldn't put it past them to try. Either way, would it really have been so troublesome for MLB to leave that brief video clip up?

26 Comments | Leave a Comment..