Online Video

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 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...

The usage of viral videos as a form of public media has grown rapidly in recent years, and political videos are no exception. During this evolution, political videos have begun quoting each other, very often utilizing Fair Use principles in order to provide commentary about other political commentators. Read more...

While researching videos for Recut, Reframe, Recycle, I was often struck by the meta verse that exists in the user generated content world. Videos that remix are often being remixed, and the dialogue is ever expanding. The Dramatic Chipmunk meme, for example, is an interesting phenomenon. While conducting our research for Recut, we found that there were over 92 remixes of the "original video" (which was actually a remix of a Japanese television show.)Read more...