YouTube Copyright Article #224

Yet another story about YouTube and copyright issues.
First off, a parody music video about the Web 2.0 world called “Here Comes Another Bubble” was taken down, after a photographer whose picture appeared in the video sicced a lawyer. This one’s been discussed to death in the blogosphere, though I’ll say this: A one-second use of a photo, especially of a person who likely did not sign a release for the photo, is almost certainly fair use, however the totality of the work could be ruled a copyright violation.
See, the video uses a lot of images that it did not seek permission for, and a court might decide that while use of a single image is fair use, a compilation of images is not fair use, and as a result the work, taken as a whole, violated multiple copyrights. And don’t use the parody defense, since the video is […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg