An Animal Charity’s Slick Musical Production Meets a Legal Waterloo

Some nonprofits are promoting their causes online by venturing into the popular video concept known as “lip dubbing,” in which choreographed participants mouth the words to a particular song while the camera moves around to capture their efforts in one unbroken take. But one charity’s experience offers a cautionary tale: The music might not be legally available to copy.

SPCA Wake County learned how seriously copyright owners are about protecting their work when lawyers for the pop group Abba demanded in November that the North Carolina animal-welfare group take down its video from YouTube that featured the song “Take a Chance on Me.”

Darci VanderSlik, the charity’s marketing manager, came up with the music-video idea after watching a lip-dub video made by her alma mater, Grand Valley State University, in Michigan. She thought the shelter could produce something similar, and since other people also made YouTube videos with the Abba song, she thought it was perfectly fine to use the upbeat music.

For a month, the pet-adoption nonprofit carefully planned its video, choreographing the moves of its volunteers and staff members and blocking camera angles. It was a lot of hard work, even though SPCA received help from a video-production company.

Apparently, all that preparation wasn’t such a good idea. Abba’s lawyers said the video looked too professional and commercial, says Ms. VanderSlik.

She told the lawyers that the charity did not pay a penny to make the video; production team members volunteered their time. The lawyers for Abba “didn’t believe us,” she says. “We thought it was a good promotion” for the band.

SPCA of Wake County’s video, which included a silent plea for donations, didn’t go unnoticed. It was viewed 65,000 times in six days before the video was taken down, and it raised about $10,000 during that time. (The charity uploaded a new version of the video to YouTube, stripped of the Abba song. However, if one searches on YouTube for the words “Take a Chance on Me” and “dogs,” a version of the original video, uploaded by a dog-shelter group in Moscow, can still be found on the site.)

Despite the legal tangles, SPCA of Wake County officials aren’t discouraged. They plan to do another lip-dub video, but this time, they’ll make sure to check the copyright of the music first.

“We know we can do it,” Ms. VanderSlik says. “We know that the next one we’re gonna do better.”