Trump's Nickelback meme gets taken off Twitter for copyright violation

Image: Today - Season 66
Nickelback performs on "Today" in 2017. Copyright Nathan Congleton TODAY
By Allan Smith with NBC News Politics
Share this articleComments
Share this articleClose Button

Trump's Wednesday night tweet riffed on a popular meme where users replace the photograph the band's lead singer holds in a music video.

ADVERTISEMENT

"LOOK AT THIS PHOTOGRAPH," President Donald Trump implored on Twitter Wednesday. But the video the president tweeted did not make Warner Music Group laugh.

The record label sent a copyright complaint to Twitter over Trump's use of the music video for the Nickelback song "Photograph," altered to attack former Vice President Joe Biden. Soon after, Twitter removed the video from Trump's account.

In its place was a message that read: "This media has been disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner."

Reached by NBC News on Thursday, a Twitter spokesman said: "Per our copyright policy, we respond to valid copyright complaints sent to us by a copyright owner or their authorized representatives."

A copy of the complaint, sent by Warner's music division, was located on Lumen, a database that tracks such filings.

In Trump'sedit of the original music video, the photograph held by the band's lead singer is swapped with one taken in 2014 that shows Biden, his son Hunter Biden and Devon Archer, a longtime business associate of Hunter Biden who served with the former vice president's son on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma. The video labels Archer, a U.S. citizen who worked with Hunter across a number of projects, as a "Ukraine gas exec."

The video was a riff on a popular meme where users replace the photograph that Nickelback's lead singer, Chad Kroeger, is holding. The lyrics of the song include the phrase, "look at this photograph."

This marked the second time in 2019 that a Trump tweet was edited as a result of copyright infringement. In April, the president posted a video that featured music from the Batman film "The Dark Knight Rises." That video was removed in response to atakedown notice from Warner Bros.

Share this articleComments