Intellectual Property Law

A new satirical video that mocks Republicans has topped the charts on YouTube and elsewhere this week, perhaps illustrating that there's a untapped market online for budding Michael Moores.

The provocative partisan video, embedded below, is the creation of British born writer and director Charlie Steak and Synthetic Human Pictures, a digital film production house in Phoenix, Arizona.

"We made this with the intent of creating a viral video that would reach as many people as possible with the goal of causing them to register to vote," Steak said in an interview. "I'm very depressed about the general direction that America seems to be headed in under eight years of Republican leadership."

Steak has lived in the US for years, and is a citizen. "I love America. I'm so glad that I live here. I just don't believe that we do treat all citizens equally, and I don't believe that we should be spending what we're spending on this war to make people in other countries hate us," he said.

Unlike other viral videos, however, this one links back to a web page that more fully explains the filmmakers' earnest points of view as expressed in the video.

Steak, 46, says that it took him a day to write the script and Synthetic Human Pictures about three months of shooting on the week-ends to complete the project. He raised $2,000 to finance it.

The video, posted on YouTube on Tuesday, has already garnered more than 680,000 views as of Friday evening.  It has sparked off a raging debate of 3,253 comments, making it the most discussed video on YouTube for the week. It has received 3,626 "Diggs" on the social bookmarking site Digg, and is the number one listing on Unruly Media's Viral Video Chart for the week.

Maybe it's time for someone to make "I'm voting Democrat?"