Fair Use

On June 3, 2008, the day that Barack Obama became the presumptive presidential nominee for the Democratic party, Republican presidential candidate John McCain gave a speech to a small group of followers in front of a green screen. The next day, Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert declared this a challenge from McCain to edit the images on that green screen in order to "make him seem interesting." Practically a national call to expand Fair Use.Read more...

I had the great pleasure of presenting at the National Conference for Media Reform this past weekend, on a panel called "Copyright Wars: Will Filtering Censor Free Speech and Kill Net Neutrality?" Joining me on this panel were Alex Curtis of Public Knowledge, Robert Millis of Hudson Street Media, and Elizabeth Stark of the MIT Free Culture Group.Read more...

In a recent ruling, judge Sidney Stein stated that the filmmakers of Expelled, a film supporting intelligent design, were likely to win a Fair Use claim if Yoko Ono persued her suit against them. The filmmakers used a 15 second clip of John Lennon's song "Imagine" to make a statement on religion in our culture--read the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog entry on the subject: http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/06/02/yoko-onos-injunction-request-denied-...
Read more...

In an effort to explore the nature of Fair Use violations on the web, MIT Free Culture, a student organization at MIT, has created YouTomb, a website the regularly scans YouTube and posts information (but not the videos themselves) about clips that are taken down due to "copyright infringement." MIT Free Culture claims that the website was created to "shed light on YouTube's practices, to educate the general public on the relevant copyright issues, and to provide helpful resources to users who have had their videos wrongfully taken down Read more...

For the last 15 years, film scholars have been asserting their Fair Use rights to reproduce stills and frame grabs of films and videos they discuss in their work. They’ve been helped by a clear statement of their rights created by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Read more...