Big Music is harshing hip, tech-savvy narcissists' mellows: Record label EMI is suing Vimeo for encouraging lip dubs, wherein flipcam-possessing twenty-somethings make video of themselves dancing around and lip-syncing to their iPods.

Vimeo—the twee-est and Brooklyn-est of video sharing sites—is home to such channels as Lip Dub Stars, where the blurb explains the genesis of this venerable new form:

The term "lip dub" was coined by Jakob Lodwick, founder of Vimeo. The videos are filmed with the song dubbed over the footage during editing, which lends theatrical heft and volume to what would otherwise be a routine lip-sync.

Here's a sample of Jakob destroying the music industry. (That sentence was meant ironically, but then, he does sort of ruin the song.)

Mediapost reports that music giant EMI has filed suit in New York complaining that Vimeo encourages users to violate copyrights by using high-quality copies of songs in their entirety, then hosts said copies. However! Lip dub advocates claim fair use, and art: "I've seen plenty of lip dubs that struck me as extremely creative and transformative and that put things in an entirely new perspective," said an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer.

The lip-dubious battle is but a skirmish in the Great Internet Music War of Generation Napster. I'm rooting for Team Lip Dub, because if the music industry can't handle adultolescents lip syncing soft rock hits for personal blogs read by tens, then it's too far behind the times to be worth saving, anyway.

[MediaPost] [LipDubStars]