viz.

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.

The choice of the Happy Tree Friends is an interesting one. The cute woodland animals are not without controversy, as they have been attacked by parents’ groups for their depictions of violence. What’s more interesting for the purposes of this post, though, is that the Happy Tree Friends themselves couldn’t exist without Fair Use protections, yet they star in a cartoon that gives short shrift to users’ fair use rights. Compare the characters Lumpy and Splendid with another famous moose and flying squirrel. 

Image Credit: Steve Eighinger & the Happy Tree Friends Wiki

The similarities are intentional, and I’m sure the creators of Happy Tree Friends would claim parody protections under Fair Use. Their cartoons, after all, are a cross between Rocky & Bullwinkle and The Itchy & Scratchy Show from The Simpsons. In their normal cartoons, the Happy Tree Friends dismember each other and fall victim to many industrial accidents. They’ve cleaned up their act a bit for the YouTube Copyright School, though.

The YouTube Copyright School video centers around Russell, a pirate sea otter who can’t seem to avoid violating copyright law. He captures video in a theater with his smartphone, films a live performance, and even attempts a mashup using his own puppetry set to copyrighted music. Only when he creates his own song for his final video does he avoid the narrator’s ire, and when he creates original content, he has “the right to post [the video] to YouTube." 

The video addresses three situations where Russell has violated copyright, and gives only one scenario where he would avoid getting strikes against him: “by singing an original song” and “creating [his] own content”

While this is one scenario when copyright law would not be violated, the video fails to account for other forms content creation that would fall under Fair Use, and specifically places mashups in the “violates copyright” category, though that debate is far from over.

YouTube does address Fair Use in the context of mashups, but the visual and aural rhetoric is designed to mystify users and dissuade them from using copyrighted material. From cute scenarios acted out by the characters, we get a quick 23-second treatment of Fair Use, and this treatment is far from fair.

Fair Use literally forces its way onto the screen and crushes the main character. The narrator then reads through some legalese explaining fair use at a speed normally reserved for the end of commercials, where the fine print exculpates a company for any injuries sustained from the product. The speed at which it’s read coupled with its violent entry and intimidating wall of text paint Fair Use in a scary light, something reserved for lawyers and judges and not the laypeople of YouTube. This visual message is clear: Fair Use is dangerous and unintelligible, so you shouldn’t concern yourself with it anyway.

YouTube’s Copyright School chooses to make the rights of copyright holders seem simple, while portraying the rights of users, mashup artists, remixers, and home video enthusiasts as abstract and complex. In its defense, YouTube began offering a Creative Commons licensing option for uploaded videos, so it is stepping in the right direction to allow users to share their creations (though, at the time of this posting, there is no option to disallow commercial use of uploaded creative commons videos). YouTube’s reasoning behind their rhetoric is somewhat understandable, as Google is a company attempting to protect themselves against further litigation from copyright holders like Viacom and Fox. However, YouTube is a site that built itself on user-generated content, and as such, it owes its users a fair representation of current copyright law. YouTube’s Copyright School presents a skewed version of copyright, one which tips the balance in favor of owners over culture and public domain. Such portrayals can have a chilling effect on participatory media, where Fair Use is exercised less and less because people are frightened by possible ramifications.