Chris Higgins
Fair Use: How to Prevent Wrongful YouTube Take-Downs
by Chris Higgins - April 29, 2010 - 5:26 PM

Know Your Meme has a simple guide on how to dispute YouTube when they take down one of your videos for allegedly infringing on copyright. This is a must-view/must-read for anyone who makes parody, commentary, or other content on YouTube that builds on existing content. Now, this is not about how to circumvent copyright laws — it’s about protecting your Fair Use rights when you’ve made something that is legal.

A critical resource linked to by Know Your Meme is the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video. It’s an extraordinarily detailed document about Fair Use and how it applies to online video specifically. If you don’t have a few hours to read and digest that, just check out the Know Your Meme video below:

(If you have no idea why this is becoming a hot issue right now, check out this video about the “Downfall” videos and their recent removal requests by the film’s production company.)

« Previous Post   -   Next Post »
Click here to get a Risk-Free issue of mental_floss magazine
Comments (5)

  1. Those clips are awesome. I can’t believe their trying to take down the Downfall clips. Those are clearly done as parodies and criticisms.

    If parody was illegal, Weird Al would have been arrested long ago.

    Bring back Downfall parodies!!!

    posted by Josiah on 4-29-2010 at 10:00 pm

  2. Weird Al has never parodied a song without the artist’s permission… FYI

    posted by Laurel on 4-30-2010 at 7:25 am

  3. Weird Al does ask the artist’s permission, but it’s not always granted. Coolio wasn’t happy about “Amish Paradise” as a parody, for example. He only asks permission because apparently he’s a really, really nice guy.

    posted by Amanda on 4-30-2010 at 8:16 am

  4. So I wonder how many people outside a fairly select audience had heard of Downfall before the parodies? And subsequently, if the company sees any correlation between dvd sales/rentals since the parodies came into being?

    All I know is that it’s in my netflix queue, and it never would have been without the parodies.

    It’s like when people order to have their commercials taken off youtube. Because people are watching them. Voluntarily. Lousy free advertising.

    posted by EV on 4-30-2010 at 10:17 am

  5. Weird Al thought he had permission from Coolio – Al trusted someone else to handle that and they told him it had been approved.
    You don’t need permission to parody or cover a song, but you do need to pay the royalties. Al just gets permission from the artists because that’s who he is.

    posted by PartiallyDeflected on 4-30-2010 at 2:16 pm

Comment

commenting policy