Viking Burial (Technoviking Archive)
A 2026 recreation made with Glif. I couldn’t find a copy of the original Zuljin pixel art.
Viking Burial is a little Ruby script that archives every Technoviking-related video on YouTube, plus its metadata, to make the beloved Internet icon “cease & desist proof.”
Technoviking does not dance to the C&D!! The C&D dances to Technoviking!!
That’s from the README.
Background
Technoviking was one of the Internet’s first viral video stars. Matthias Fritsch filmed a shirtless, commanding man at the Fuckparade street rave in Berlin on July 8, 2000, and posted it online in 2001. He put it on YouTube himself in 2006, and it blew up in 2007.
Then the man in the video took legal action. His lawyers sent Fritsch a cease-and-desist letter in December 2009 (judgment). In early 2010 Fritsch blocked the original YouTube video with annotations and stopped selling merch (Fritsch’s archive). I started Viking Burial around the same time.
The project
I wrote the first version on February 12, 2010 (commit history). It downloads a list of Technoviking videos from YouTube and saves:
- the raw
.flvvideo file - the video’s metadata as XML (stats, who created it and so on)
In April 2010 Greg Leuch sent a patch to pull the actual video from YouTube. The README calls it “Public domain / No rights reserved,” a FAT Lab release.
I ran it and kept the archive. The Know Your Meme forum thread that kicked it off, from February 2010, ends with “An archive has been taken.”
What happened next
His case against Fritsch opened in Berlin on January 17, 2013 (Wikipedia). On May 30, 2013 the Berlin Regional Court ruled partly in his favor. Fritsch had to stop publishing his image, hand over €8,001.41 of what he’d earned from it and pay €1,419.19 of the man’s legal fees. The court turned down the €10,000 in damages he asked for and split court costs 56% to Fritsch, 44% to him (judgment). The meme outlived all of it; see Know Your Meme.
The archive, still on my NAS: 37 videos plus their metadata.
Links
See also: FAT Lab