fair use

YouTube & Fair Use (Part II)

Image Credit: Scott Nelson, Creative Commons, Attribute, Share-Alike

Last week, I addressed only the first stages in a YouTube copyright dispute. Should a copyright holder wish to issue a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice, the process is a bit more involved. This past year, the company introduced the YouTube Copyright School, a kind of “traffic school” for copyright violations. If a user receives a copyright violation notice, she is forced to watch a five-minute cartoon about copyright and complete ten questions regarding the content. As I mentioned above, on the third such copyright notice, the user is banned from uploading to YouTube for life. YouTube commissioned the creators of The Happy Tree Friends to craft the video tutorial, and so far, the video has received over half a million views, with around 1600 likes and five times as many dislikes. While the video certainly informs users of their rights and responsibilities under copyright, it uses visual rhetoric to present copyright law as frightening and complicated. Such a characterization contributes to the chilling effect on using copyrighted content to create YouTube videos.

YouTube & Fair Use

Recently, one of my YouTube videos was automatically removed for "copyright violations." I decided to take a closer look into YouTube's policies and found they may be dissuading users from exercising their Fair Use rights. 

Challenging a Youtube Video Take Down


Image Credit:  Know Your Meme H/T Hampton Finger

This youtube video explains the difference between fair use and copyright infringement involving Youtube videos.  It also shows how to dispute the take-down of your video on Youtube, if you have created a fair use work.

 

Using Creative Commons Images

arriving horizon

Image Credit: "Hospitality II" by Arriving at the Horizon Via Clinamen

For this entry, I want to point out two online texts that model best practices in the use of images.  Both texts also make powerful arguments. The first is Clinamen, an academic blog by James J. Brown, formerly of UT-Austin and the Digital Writing and Research Lab, who now teaches in Detroit at Wayne State.  The image above is from Brown's March 16 post. Indeed, all of Brown's entries are organized by a compelling, and beautiful, image (see screenshot after the break).  

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