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Why Is This Homo-Faux Music Video For Katy Perry ‘California Girls’ Getting Yanked Off YouTube? (Updated)

See what the Fire Island Boys hath wrought? Katy Perry’s video for “California Girls” is only in the sneak peek stage, but already a troupe calling themselves the Washington Boys have produced their own gay flick for it. And then comes the scandal factor: Is EMI trying to keep it offline?

That’s what Kevin Farrell, who created the video with his friends, claims via email:

Over the past two weeks, my friends and I shot a music video to Katy Perry’s “California Girls”, which we lovingly called the Washington Boys remix. A gay bar in Seattle held a premiere party for the video last night, and a full house arrived for the unveiling. It was a total hit, but moments after airing the video, EMI removed it from YouTube for copyright violation. This of course puzzled us in the age of Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus amazing fan videos, and we felt completely destroyed by the turn of events. However, people at the party started to notice that there are DOZENS of other videos using the same song all over Youtube and other video sites, some resung or tweaked, but many using the exact track we used. And they all remain up. One video even has over 100,000 views.

EMI only removed the Katy Perry video made by 7 gay boys. The rest remain! Adding bitter fuel to the fire is the fact that the video was to be hosted today on UnicornBooty.com, a site that connects people with gay-friendly businesses. We’ve tweeted @KatyPerry, emailed her pal Perez Hilton, and so much more trying to save this video we poured so much love and hard work into. Please help save our video by bringing to light EMI’s very discriminatory and backwards practice of policing the internet for fan content produced only by the gay community.

Indeed, we’ve found a few covers, spoofs, and faux videos for “California Girls” on YouTube that haven’t been pulled.

So what gives? Are there too many rainbow flags in this version? Too many fagalas? We’ve reached out to Perry’s publicist at EMI to see if the label has a comment (maybe it’s just an overzealous copyright filter to blame?), but complicating the situation might be the way EMI and Warner Music have reached a deal over Perry’s recordings: “While EMI will continue to control Perry’s actual recordings, Warner/Chappell controls the underlying compositions on her current album and in her back catalog. That means they’ll get performance royalties every time one of her songs is played and a mechanical licensing fee for each album sold or song downloaded.”


UPDATE: Kevin emails us with the good news that YouTube is letting the video stay online, here.

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