The Dancing Baby was an early viral GIF, emerging from a place where new and old media first found a common audience, a place that is now filled with darkness and anxiety but then seemed to promise wonders and new horizons. The dissolving of things was both anticipated and embraced; just not the dissolving of all human bonds before the graceless and impassive crush of technology. Anyway, someone found the original 3D model and uploaded it to the internet! Yay! Dancing Baby 2020.

HOW I RE-DISCOVERED THE MODEL FOR 'THE DANCING BABY', RE-RENDERED THE ORIGINAL MEME IN HD, AND PORTED IT TO GMOD: A THREAD (1/11)(Mod: https://t.co/aE6Wse2tWN , YT: https://t.co/6fOjisXXMz) pic.twitter.com/J0ASNxncdB

— JArmstrongArt (@JArmstrongArty) February 7, 2020

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In 2008, Universal Music fraudulently claimed that a short Youtube clip of a toddler dancing to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" was a copyright infringement, leading to eight years of litigation and, eventually, a landmark ruling secured by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in which the court found that Universal had a duty to consider fair use before using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to censor other peoples' media. Read the rest