Comments on: The Latest and Greatest in Fair Use vs. Legal Caution

By: Evin M

Evin M — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 01:14:29 +0000

It seems like lots of people are catching onto the censorship uses of the DMCA…

Fox News complained to YouTube enough to get them to remove clips from the account of a union-sponsored group that had videos of political events. It’s pretty strategic–if Fox can make people take down their politically opposing commentary about a timely event, the information will be pretty outdated by the time the video goes back up in a few days (if it does go back up at all).

By: Adi Kamdar

Adi Kamdar — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 05:00:56 +0000

Regarding the McDonald’s takedown… isn’t this similar to the OPG v. Diebold case? Isn’t the video pretty clearly fair use since it’s serving as criticism–explicit or not–to McDonald’s policy?

By: Elizabeth Stark

Elizabeth Stark — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:52:38 +0000

As we’ve seen with the McCain/YouTube example, copyright law can act as a way to censor timely content, even if temporarily. I don’t think the creators of the DMCA necessarily anticipated the impact that 10 business days could make. Now that online video plays such a huge role in media consumption, it can mean the difference between before and after an election and actually have a significant impact. As mentioned in class, I do think that there should be a way to preemptively declare a work as a fair use, and even if a takedown notice is sent, it should stay up — an anticipatory counternotification of sorts.

In related news, McDonalds recently used a takedown notice to censor a potentially damaging video. I have a feeling we’ll only see more examples of censorship in the name of DMCA takedowns.

By: Stuart S

Stuart S — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 00:05:38 +0000

I agree. There should be some system for simplifying the legal action of countersuing when fair use comes into play. As is, the cost and bureaucratic hurdles involved in successfully countersuing a take-down notice greatly outweigh the potential benefit of having a clip up on YouTube (such as the World Series snippet we saw in class). In the process, perfectly legal fair use, usually some sort of commentary on the work and protected under the right to free speech, is limited calling into question the fairness of our current legal system. Great post!

By: Brian L

Brian L — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:00:48 +0000

Really interesting post, Dan. I wonder if there would be a way for people/companies to pre-clear their content for use on Youtube. That way the Youtube detection software would simply ignore videos with fragments of pre-cleared political campaign ads, movie clips, etc. Or, alternatively, copyright holders could have the option of allowing a small amount of their content (e.g. 30 seconds of a movie) to be used without causing the monitoring system to take down the video.