During the primary campaign this year, Gov. Rick Perry had a YouTube account devoted to posting videos bashing Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. Immediately after the primary, campaign workers took all those videos down.
This time, in the general election, which comes to a climax Tuesday, YouTube did the job for them. The Google-owned video site recently shut down Perry's "Liberal Bill" YouTube channel because of "multiple third-party notifications of copyright infringement," according to the website. The videos on the account were all critical of Democratic challenger Bill White.
"YouTube didn't appreciate our campaign using some of the music we chose for our parody videos," Perry spokesman Mark Miner said. He added that the content in the videos was accurate.
White's campaign countered that the videos were taken down for illegal activity by the Perry camp. Spokeswoman Katy Bacon said the videos were filled with "false, negative attacks."
"He's suffering the consequences of his casual relationship with the law," Bacon said.
Perry's and several other campaigns have incorporated popular music into online ads this election cycle. Though they would pay high fees to use songs by U2, the Beatles and Marvin Gaye in TV commercials, most Texas candidates haven't secured the rights to use music by those musicians for Web-only videos.
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