How fair is fair use anyway??

in #fair-use4 years ago

New projects, eagerness dulls.

This past year one of my loves is to watch reaction videos, mainly for TV shows and films that I have watched, to get the content creators opinion on what they thought of the film or TV show.
Reaction videos seem to be at an all time high at the moment, I know many people do reaction videos to general you tube videos etc, where they have gathered a large amount of followers.
I thought well I love watching films and tv shows, could I do that perhaps? So after watching hundreds of videos and doing some research I got to work.

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Credit Wikipedia

I did my first video which was a review of a film called The Mothman Prophecies, starring Richard Gere and Deborah Messing. It was the first time watching it, so I thought it was a good way to show reactions to something I hadn't watched.
It took some time to do because there is the setting up of the video, then the recording which ended up with a file of 64GB, so i had to learn how to compress it, which I discovered a programme called handbrake.

After that then I had to edit it down to something smaller, producing a video of around 30 minutes, compress it again and upload it. So I did but as soon as I did Youtube notified me of a content id notification. So when I published the video I included a disclaimer regarding fair use which I posted as follows.

Copyright Disclaimer, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship and research. NO COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT INTENDED. All rights belong to their respective owners.

When looking at the notification it has been banned in two countries for a piece of music, that was included in the video, which was picked up by one of Googles bots. So I did dispute it on the grounds of fair use to say that in no way was I looking to monetize the video, I could not anyway because its a new channel, but also I would not look to profit on the back of other peoples work.

So i thought well the video is still allowed even being regarding the notification so that was good enough for me.

But fair use is not that black and white.

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Credit IMDB

So I decided the day before yesterday time to do another one. and I decided to go for the new TV show The haunting of Bly Manor. It was long anticipated, and something i was eager to sink my teeth into, I. had watched plenty of reactions to Netflix Shows, so I thought ok great lets get this going. Same process as before, clicked and hit upload which again I got a Notification not a strike but this time it was a worldwide block WTF?

All that work for something i really wanted to put out there to give my opinion on the show and it was disallowed. I immediately went to dispute, which i lodged, but it was not until I looked that the reason for it being disallowed was a certain segment, which was even highlighted to me. Had I have read it properly and just removed the segment and re-edited it probably would have been fine. But once you add that dispute, you cannot do anything with the video until either 30 days has elapsed, or Netflix comes back and approves or disapproves, which you can then do the necessary and then put it through.

There is so much work involved that I had no idea

Not that it has swayed me at all, its a learning curve, and it helps me get a better idea about copyrights and fair use, but there is a super amount of work that goes into these things. Really I feel that my time here on Hive will be put to the use of continuing with these videos, one of the reasons im actually back is because I uploaded them to Tube, not to profit but for more work to be seen, as I understand this is my reaction to the video not for the sole purpose to show the video and take away the original content creators earnings. Fair use is such a grey area, and to make it more confusing it changes from country to country. So I hope to be able to keep updating with what I am learning in the hope to reach out to others who also want more of an insight to this information.

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Good luck with your projects!


(100% beneficiary to original post author)

The legal doctrine of fair use is pretty fair, in theoretical terms at least.

But YouTube/Google's extrajudicial approach to it is at best arbitrary, and often abusive.

It's contrary to the objective of intellectual property rights — which that the People grant an artificial monopoly on creative work, with the goal that it will benefit society at large.

By stifling criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship and research YouTube, Google and others work directly against that societal goal in the name of industry rent seeking.