One Direction Fans Melt Down At Aussie Band Over Video Removal

You could never accuse UK pop juggernauts One Direction of having a passive fan base, with the largely adolescent army hitting Twitter in droves today, filled with misdirected rage over the video clip for semi-recent single You & I being taken off YouTube over a copyright infringement claim.

However, it's not the claimant — which appears to be Dubai-based broadcaster Panther Media Group Limited — that is copping the brunt of Directioners' ill-informed anger; it's Aussie band Clubfeet and Melbourne-based production company Oh Yeah Wow, who made headlines earlier in the year after significant similarities were raised between the You & I clip, directed by Ben Winston, and one produced by Oh Yeah Wow for Clubfeet's track Everything You Wanted. It wasn't a unique story, even for that clip - last year Clubfeet went through the same thing with Japanese outfit [Champagne].

Evidently, some super-fans did a quick search for answers and found stories from earlier in the year linking Clubfeet and Oh Yeah Wow to One Direction and ran with it, totally ignoring who Panther Media Group might be (well, except for one bloke, but even then, he tweeted the wrong Panther Media) in favour of instead hurling a litany of crazy-abusive tweets in the direction of the — as far as we can tell — innocent Australian parties. In fact, a lot of early tweets about it point explicitly to Oh Yeah Wow's original post — from back in April — as being "the reason" behind the video's removal.

Clubfeet addressed the saga on their Twitter page today, explaining that they had nothing to do with the takedown, while Oh Yeah Wow director Darcy Prendergast told Channel [V]: "We've no association with Panther Media … Obviously we found it pretty hilarious when the director, Ben Winston, ripped off our Clubfeet clip in the first place, but we'd completely forgotten about that until a new wave of Directioner hate mail spilled into the Twitter feed."

Of course, none of that matters to outraged 1D fans, who have spent much of the morning offering up variably legible outbursts 140 characters at a time. Naturally, it's been morbidly entertaining to watch. Let's have a look...

This fan fails to grasp the central point of why the clips were deemed similar in the first place, which wasn't for the widely shared screencap of dudes jumping in both, but the actual effects used within:

This Twitter user, whose profile blurb is literally just the chorus lyrics to Forever Young, which should tell you a lot, is nowhere near as threatening as she thinks:

We can only hope that this fan never has to actually deal with an emotionally trying event in her life, because holy shit, dude, it's a film clip:

There is nothing like a bit of caps lock, petty accusations and terrible research to really make your point:

"Who cares about the outright duplication of someone's distinct intellectual property? What about meeeeee?":

Yes, friend, that's kind of what plagiarism is:

This person sounds like they're talking to a drunk driver who backed over a toddler:

So. Much. Hyperbole:

To be completely fair to Directioners, not all of them are on-board with the campaign of hatred being flung Oh Yeah Wow and Clubfeet's way. Several commenters are tweeting their disapproval of Winston and support for the Aussies in kind, while at least one rational fan was big enough to admit that, even if Clubfeet and Oh Yeah Wow weren't behind the takedown, they could still certainly appreciate the aesthetic similarities between the clips.

Maybe all hope for these people is not lost after all. Watch Clubfeet's clip via YouTube below (we'd link in the 1D one too, but, well... we can't.)