Elisa Kreisinger's Pick for Fair Use Video of the Month: The Yes Men

The Yes Men employed fair use to provide a critique of economic and political leaders' public pronouncements (and their actions). As the 2012 World Economic Forum began in Davos Switzerland, these Yes Men remixes (created in 2010) provided a dissident variation on the forum’s new theme: The Great Transformation: Shaping New Models. Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) immediately filed a takedown notice to remove the remix of its CEO Patricia Woertz from YouTube (check Vimeo, though, here, and here, and here), and The Yes Men's parallel website we-forum.org.

Why It's Fair Use: Quoting in order to recombine elements to make a new work that depends for its meaning on (often unlikely) relationship between the elements, as the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video makes clear. The creators quoted the copyrighted material to create a new meaning through juxtaposition. By re-dubbing and re-editing the audio, the creators change the meaning of all three pieces of copyrighted material, addressing a very different audience than their intended original.