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 [2], and here [3], and here [4]), and The Yes Men's parallel website we-forum.org [5].

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 [6] 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.