can someone explain fair use to me

So I created a sports video of my favorite team consisting of highlights put to music.

The video was rejected by Google Video citing violation of copyright. This is odd because I uploaded an almost identical video in May with no problem.

What I don't get is why a collection of highlights put to music is copyright infringement. Isn't this just "fair use"? It's not like I'm making money on it. [C]

Am I not allowed to legally create a sports video using music and hightlights I like and share it with other fans? If the answer to this is no, something needs to change.

I don't think we have any lawyers here, so I think I should refer you to some more knowledgable sources:

US Copyright office:  http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

Stanford Fair Use Center:  http://fairuse.stanford.edu/

IUPUI:  http://www.copyright.iupui.edu/fairuse.htm

Copylaw.com:  http://www.copylaw.com/new_articles/fairuse.html

This sums it up pretty well...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY-2YshuJ8o

(Fair Use and Free Speech)

ploe wrote:

Am I not allowed to legally create a sports video using music and hightlights I like and share it with other fans? If the answer to this is no, something needs to change.

If you don't own the rights to redistribute the music...

This sickness called "copyright madness". Unfortunately it's not treatable. This virus came from planet called "Hell". Very soon you even will not have a right to remember some audio/video materials! You will be forced to forgot or pay for this.

Corporations are going crazy...

Some "science fiction" isn't so fictional.

Bring back intellectual property laws from the Soviet Union.  Everything is the property of the society to be distributed to anyone who wants it.

How far would Tetris of got if people had to pay for it?

daSmirnov wrote:

Bring back intellectual property laws from the Soviet Union.  Everything is the property of the society to be distributed to anyone who wants it.

Yeah, that worked well...

daSmirnov wrote:

How far would Tetris of got if people had to pay for it?

Do you mean "Falling blocks you use to make lines"?

anyways some of the copyright crap is getting out of hand next thing you know people will be arrested for whistling their favorite tunes.

PaoloM wrote:



daSmirnov wrote: Bring back intellectual property laws from the Soviet Union.  Everything is the property of the society to be distributed to anyone who wants it.

Yeah, that worked well...

Not everything was the property of the people in the good 'ol CCCP, for example a private citizen in the RSFSR couldnt procure the designs of a SS-19. Granted our IP laws need some work, however I dont think Soviet-izing them would fix anything.

Jason Cox wrote:



PaoloM wrote:  daSmirnov wrote: Bring back intellectual property laws from the Soviet Union.  Everything is the property of the society to be distributed to anyone who wants it. Yeah, that worked well...

Not everything was the property of the people in the good 'ol CCCP, for example a private citizen in the RSFSR couldnt procure the designs of a SS-19. Granted our IP laws need some work, however I dont think Soviet-izing them would fix anything.

Yeah IMHO the whole copyright / patent / trademark / servicemark thing needs a deep re-work.  the way it's gone the last 10 years we have been going the wrong way ....

figuerres wrote:

Yeah IMHO the whole copyright / patent / trademark / servicemark thing needs a deep re-work.  the way it's gone the last 10 years we have been going the wrong way ....

No, the U.S. lobbyist system needs to change. You wouldn't have a century or so of copyright protection if companies like Disney didn't buy off Congressmen. Is Mickey Mouse saved for the time being? Yes. The negative? Think of all of the public domain literature that now falls under this umbrella of corporate fear.

I'm actually wondering if the Gutenberg Project had to remove a bunch of it's volumes for download because of the copyright extension?

Found out that the U.S. one isn't as bad as the EU one.

"Unlike copyright extension legislation in the European Union, the Sonny Bono Act did not revive copyrights that had already expired."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

Sing your own songs, draw your own pictures, take photographs and make a video of your smile.

eagle wrote:

Sing your own songs, draw your own pictures, take photographs and make a video of your smile.

In many ways today, fair use is whatever corporations want it to be. That's because they have more money to go to court, and there is also too much of a defend the property owner attitude.

Fair use, interpreted in the other direction can be very broad. Fair use -can- be interpreted in a way to mean any use that doesn't involve direct profit from the material.

But instead of just not being interpreted in a broad way, now its being interpreted in an overly draconian narrow way., where anyone who makes a copy under different terms than what the company is happy with, they're a criminal.

Fair use is intended to protect -public rights- but instead of being defined for the public, its being defined by the owners, what they LET the public have.

Now there are also a lot of laws proposed to increase the term of the copyright, even though it already has been increased since it was established. People routinely talk as if copyright laws were a non-debated issue when they were established. When they were debated, equal side was given to the argument that copyright laws are damaging. Which is why there are fair use laws in the first place. Intellectual property and copyright is not god-given, its granted by grace of the public.

People have had to fight just to have public domain laws be interpreted rightly--because objects in public domain have been de facto the property of others, because people who own things can legally prevent people from accessing it to take copies, and then copyright the copies. It was just recently that a court ruled in a way to fix this.

Then, the same corporations who defend copyrights, patents, and intellectual property in court, act without conscience to steal things from small inventors who by all right should have the ownership of the patents.

Harlequin wrote:



figuerres wrote: Yeah IMHO the whole copyright / patent / trademark / servicemark thing needs a deep re-work.  the way it's gone the last 10 years we have been going the wrong way ....

No, the U.S. lobbyist system needs to change. You wouldn't have a century or so of copyright protection if companies like Disney didn't buy off Congressmen. Is Mickey Mouse saved for the time being? Yes. The negative? Think of all of the public domain literature that now falls under this umbrella of corporate fear.

I'm actually wondering if the Gutenberg Project had to remove a bunch of it's volumes for download because of the copyright extension?

Lobbyists are the smallest problem in government corruption. Lobbyists give congressmen money for trips, dinner, etc, so they can talk to them. The problem with modern politics isn't so much that congressmen are selling out for cash. Even though this happens sometimes.

The problem is that they need cash for campaigns. This effects politics in several ways, some of them not direct and obvious. The first obvious way is that they do push certain laws for contributions. But this wouldn't matter much, if it weren't the case that only candidates who the big money donors liked were able to enter the competition. The political machine is set up in a way that only candidates who are willing to take money from wealthy interests or agree with wealthy interests are in the competition in the first place. This isn't helped by ballot laws, which make things (overly) difficult for independent and third party candidates and (overly) easy for establishment candidates. A lot of people in office tend to agree with the groups that are bribing them, to no surprise, so it can't be proven as a quid pro quo.

This is why loosening ballot laws would be one of the most effective and is one of the most overlooked forms of campaign reform. And something even libertarians could agree on.a

brian.shapiro wrote:

Fair use is intended to protect -public rights- but instead of being defined for the public, its being defined by the owners, what they LET the public have.

I agree