Fair Use of Digital Media

MediaCommons reports, “YouTube purges: fair use tested“

Last week there was a wave of takedowns on YouTube of copyright-infringing material — mostly clips from television and movies.

Fortunately, since we regard these sorts of media quotations as fair use, we make it a policy to rip backups of every externally hosted clip so that we can remount them on our own server in the event of a takedown.

This is their fair use statement. I’m personally more liberal with what I’ll post here. However, if you are in doubt, this is as good a guideline as any.

MediaCommons is a strong advocate for the right of media scholars to quote from the materials they analyze, as protected by the principle of “fair use.” If such quotation is necessary to a scholar’s argument, if the quotation serves to support a scholar’s original analysis or pedagogical purpose, and if the quotation does not harm the market value of the original text — but rather, and on the contrary, enhances it — we must defend the scholar’s right to quote from the media texts under study.

In Media Res, a MediaCommons project, has an innovative “blog.” They “provide 30-second to 3-minute clips accompanied by a 100-150-word impressionistic responses.” See the latest post, Two Words: Chuck Norris here for example.

Image: “Steal this Album” by The Coup