How Not Shocked Are We to Learn That Trump Doesn't Understand Copyright Law?

Earlier tonight, our president posted a short video on his Twitter account. Captioned with the usual “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” the ad was a badly edited mishmash of glorious moments from the Trump presidency juxtaposed with the faces of totally owned libs like the Obamas, the Clintons, Amy Schumer, and Rosie O’Donnell.

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they call you racist…” title cards read, referencing a famous quote previously tweeted by Trump and misattributed to Gandhi (ironically, the quote likely originated in a speech by a union organizer in 1914).

“Your vote,” the next card reads, “proved them all wrong.”

The video ends with a Trump 2020 logo, superimposed on the completely not-fascist tagline, “The Great Victory.”

The video has been viewed by Twitter users nearly 2.5 million times since it was put up this afternoon.

Quickly, people started to realize there was something off about the ad. The sweeping, ominous score that soundtracks the ad sounded… familiar.

Turns out, they were right. Whoever made this video stole the audio from composer Han Zimmer’s score for 2012 Warner Bros. Pictures film The Dark Night Rises. Whoops!

BuzzFeed reports that Warner Bros. have filed a copyright infringement complaint to have the video removed.

“The use of Warner Bros.’ score from The Dark Knight Rises in the campaign video was unauthorized,” a spokesperson for the company told BuzzFeed. “We are working through the appropriate legal channels to have it removed.”

Like many things that end up on Trump’s Twitter, this ad wasn’t produced by an official campaign organization, but crowdsourced straight from the bowels of the internet. The video came from YouTube (where it only has 64,000 views). It was posted by user MateyProductions on April 4th, and then appeared on notorious subreddit /r/The_Donald. The user who uploaded the video gives credit to Zimmer, but that doesn’t mean they had permission to use his music. In fact, in the video description, the user writes “I do not own the rights to the footage or song.”

The White House hasn’t responded to BuzzFeed’s requests for comment. Splinter has reached out to Hans Zimmer and will update this post if we receive a response.