Showing posts with label dolphins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dolphins. Show all posts

01 November 2007

Bring on the Fair Use Dolphins

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the unsatisfactory UGC Principles put together by media companies, particularly with regard to the exiguous recognition of fair use. Well, good news, chaps, those nice people at the EFF have put together a document *totally* about Fair Use Principles for User Generated Video Content:

Online video hosting services like YouTube are ushering in a new era of free expression online. By providing a home for “user-generated content” (UGC) on the Internet, these services enable creators to reach a global audience without having to depend on traditional intermediaries like television networks and movie studios. The result has been an explosion of creativity by ordinary people, who have enthusiastically embraced the opportunities created by these new technologies to express themselves in a remarkable variety of ways.

The life blood of much of this new creativity is fair use, the copyright doctrine that permits unauthorized uses of copyrighted material for transformative purposes. Creators naturally quote from and build upon the media that makes up our culture, yielding new works that comment on, parody, satirize, criticize, and pay tribute to the expressive works that have come before. These forms of free expression are among those protected by the fair use doctrine.

New video hosting services can also be abused, however. Copyright owners are legitimately concerned that a substantial number works posted to some UGC video sites are simply unauthorized, verbatim copies of their works. Some of these rightsholders have sued service providers, and many utilize the “notice-and-takedown” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to remove videos that they believe are infringing. At the same time, a broad consensus has emerged among major copyright owners that fair use must be accommodated even as steps are taken to address copyright infringement.

All good stuff, but the best bit is the following principle:

Informal “Dolphin Hotline”
: Every system makes mistakes, and when fair use “dolphins” are caught in a net intended for infringing “tuna,” an escape mechanism must be available to them.

I don't think we're in Kansas any more.