Your Rights and Fair Use
In a bit of good news, Google, Microsoft and others from the Computer and Communications Industry Association plan on lodging a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission about fair use, and the ever increasing demands of companies that own those copyrights.
When you have something as stupid as a dancing baby pulled down because of a complaint, or the host of other associated ills, maybe this complaint actually do some good, but we are also not counting on it.
The key to knowing your ability to make parodies, or fair use of copyrighted material rests in section 107 and 108 of the United States copyright act. Knowing this is good, but then the average person on the street doing a podcast with music playing in the background as they record their missive might not really know this. Knowing what a person can and can not do is very important if web 2.0 is going to stop being mired down in lawsuits, that in many cases are meant to disrupt business (by claiming false copyright to something and having your competitors web site taken out of Google), or otherwise extend copyright into something that is generally has not been known for. The dancing baby should have stayed on YouTube.
By contrast, most scholars agree that posting a straight clip of a television show, as some YouTube users do, doesn’t fall under fair use. YouTube, which Google bought last year for more than $1.7 billion, quickly removes them once copyright holders complain. However, if the YouTube poster transforms the original clip in some way, his or her post may be protected under fair use. In its 1994 ruling in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, the Supreme Court ruled that parodies usually are protected under fair use, even if they are created for profit. Source: WSJ
You will see quotes like above all over many blogs, and they are fair use. We are not reproducing the entire WSJ article and calling it ours, that is not fair use. But we are using a snippet from the WSJ to support our point, and inform our readers with a link back to them.
That is fair use, and generally well accepted unless you are Ars Technica and leave nasty messages on this blog. They didn’t get fair use, and we basically did what we could, blocked out the quote and stayed as far away from Ars Technica as possible. We even tried to contact them, to no avail. Even though we had fair use, we went ahead and yanked it anyways, back in April we were not as sure of what we could and could not do. Many bloggers will knee jerk like we did when told by someone else to do a thing if they are trying to stay afloat.
The more people that know this the better off everyone in the blog world will be, and everyone who makes some form of media that relies on snippets from other folks to support the point. This is a fine tradition, commonly used in professional writing, and commonly used in academia. We hope that the Computer and Communications Industry Association will prevail on this one.
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