I stumbled across this television writer -- Aaron Barnhart -- when the whole Porter Berry is a Bill O'Reilly tool episode hit. So I've bookmarked the guy and this popped up. What started as a pretty bleeping hilarious link to a Bill O'Reilly You Tube video, led to an interesting writeup on copyright standards.
From the article (emphasis mine):
We've been conditioned to think that if you pull something off the web and use it, you're committing some sort of copyright infringement. But increasingly, the law is moving in exactly the opposite direction. Provided you are making a truly new use of the content, such as the totally NSFW Bill-O Dance Remix, you are in fact free to make money off your appropriation of copyrighted images and video and sound.
I've always had trouble keeping up with copyright laws. And given AP's out and out hostility toward fair use, it's always nice to receive some guidance. As Aaron Barnhart mentioned, the Center and American University’s Washington College of Law published a study titled, "Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video". From it:
Fair use is the part of copyright law that permits new makers, in some situations, to quote copyrighted material without asking permission or paying the owners. The courts tell us that fair use should be "transformative"—adding value to what they take and using it for a purpose different from the original work. So when makers mash up several works—say, The Ten Commandments , Ben-Hur and 10 Things I Hate about You , making Ten Things I Hate about Commandments —they aren’t necessarily stealing. They are quoting in order to make a new commentary on popular culture, and creating a new piece of popular culture.
However, unsurprisingly to me,
Large content holders such as NBC Universal and Viacom, and online platforms such as MySpace and Veoh are already crafting agreements on removing copyrighted material from the online sites. Legal as well as illegal copying could all too easily disappear. Worse still, a new generation of media makers could grow up with a deformed and truncated notion of their rights as creators.
So everytime AP, or NBC, or MySpace, tries to take away our ability to fairly use ("fair use"), remember Bill O'Reilly Flips Out DANCE REMIX and stand up for your rights.
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