Fair Use Redux
by Michael HoffmanMonday, May 7th, 2007
“Fair Use” is a legal term that is getting a lot of play lately. I have written about this before because it is so important to those of us making media. Fair Use is a carve-out of copyright law that says that though someone may own this TV show or movie or song, you can use it, or part of it, in certain ways without having to pay them if it falls under the Fair Use principle. Criticism, for example, is fair use. If I want to write a book review and I print an excerpt from the book, that is fair use. Same for a movie review.
Another area of fair use is parody. I can make fun of something and not need to pay them. So the record company tried, but failed to get paid for this funny video using “I Will Survive”
The problem with Fair Use is that there is no totally clear standard. The good news seems to me to be that while media companies send out a lot of cease and desist letters these days, they also back down when someone chooses to fight them. The worst case for them is to lose in court and then have legally created a stronger fair use standard.
The folks at American University’s Center for Social Media are hosting a dialog on Fair Use with OneWorld. You can “Ask the Experts” online. Patricia Aufderheide, the Center’s Director and a good friend of See3 and DoGooderTV, was interviewed this morning on NPR on the issue of fair use. You can listen to the story here.
May 9th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
I heard the NPR story about this video, but did not realize until I saw it here that I saw this video when it got passed around via email at least 2 years ago. What’s interesting about that is even a video that was viral by 2005 standards still did not generate enough attention to drive the content owner to cry infringement. It was not until YouTube created the environment and the buzz for videos to get such massive traffic, and began to generate revenue from that traffic, that copyright holders have been moved to act.