The University of Oregon has a history of making rash, uninformed decisions only to reverse course and cave to public pressure.
Will history repeat itself at next week’s Civil War football game, when the Ducks play host to Oregon State?
Last week, a trio of Oregon Students: Jamie Slade, Brian McAndrew and Michael Bishop, known as the rap group Supwitchugirl, made a music video for their song “I Love My Ducks.”
Watch it here:
Within a couple of hours of uploading the video to YouTube, it had been viewed several thousand times, and began to spread virally across social networks like Facebook.
Unfortunately, the success of the video would lead to its temporary demise as the University of Oregon marketing department caught wind of the production that prominently featured the school mascot, Puddles. The mascot is based on Donald Duck, and the school has a strict licensing agreement with Disney to use the character. Due to Puddles’ presence in the video, the group was asked to remove all traces of it online or be reported to YouTube for copyright infringement.
This was the university’s first mistake: within an hour of Supwitchugirl honoring the athletic department’s request and marking the video private, it began to appear on Facebook, Yahoo Video and again on YouTube. The video’s fans, of which there were many, began to reproduce it on every video Web site they could find.
The video has now been seen almost 130,000 times, according to today’s Oregon Daily Emerald, and among its fans are Oregon head football coach Chip Kelly, voice of the Ducks Jerry Allen and national sports personality Dan Patrick.
Strikes two and three against the university came today, eight days after the video was due to be removed from YouTube:
Trying to profit off their internet sensation, Supwitchugirl attempted to license an “I Love My Ducks” T-shirt to sell at the university bookstore, but according to the group they were denied because it would “encourage watching the video.” (Note that the university would have also profited off the backs of some creative students). Lastly, the group also stated that it had been contacted by Nike in an effort to show the video, sans Duck mascot, on the Autzen Stadium video board during the Civil War football game. The clips where Puddles appeared in the video would be replaced by football highlights from this season. Also denied despite the university claiming that the Disney copyright was the only objection the athletic department had to the video.
The students involved with Supwitchugirl clearly made a mistake by including Puddles in the video without first obtaining consent, and as the Oregon Daily Emerald reported, “The athletic department said the video’s runaway success did not change the legal reality of the situation.” That said, the students have obliged every university request, and now have public opinion on their side, while the university continues to act in its typical “We’re the only game in town” authoritarian approach it has used with fans and media for years.
This seemingly personal vendetta against the members of Supwitchugirl can come back to bite the university in the ass — that is, until the University caves in and gives these students the moment in the spotlight — at Autzen Stadium on Dec. 3 — that they deserve.
More on this story from elsewhere:
The Oregonian: Oregon gets it all wrong trying to squash viral video ‘I Love My Ducks’ – Nov. 18
The Register-Guard: Duck’s bad rap – Nov. 20
Oregon Daily Emerald: Every path has its puddles – Nov. 24