YouTube's January Fair Use Massacre

[admin]

Fair use has always been at risk on YouTube, thanks to abusive DMCA takedown notices sent by copyright owners (sometimes carelessly, sometimes not). But in the past several weeks, two things have made things much worse for those who want to sing a song, post an a capella tribute, or set machinima to music.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/01/youtubes-january-fair-use-massacre

[drfsupercenter]

I uploaded the HD trailer to Watchmen, because it previously wasn't on YouTube in HD... just in "high quality".

I got the trailer from Apple Trailers, which provides them for free in qualities up to 1080p.

It said that it may have audiovisual content by ITN (who is that?) but that they're not going to remove it. Surely the trailer is owned by Warner Bros? And if Warner Bros is being such a PITA about their stuff, why are there 50 copies of that trailer floating around?

The whole copyrighted video thing seems stupid to me anyway. It's free advertising for them! (Well, people uploading trailers, TV spots, theme songs, etc.) I can understand if they remove full-length movies or something, but if I want to use somebody's song as a background to another video (like the few music videos I've made that were not removed)... if you say what the song is, people will be more likely to buy it, which gives these companies money. I'm sure whatever studio owns that infamous Rick Astley song couldn't be happier with all the people buying that poor excuse for a song after it's been spammed around the Net many times.
(And I've actually noticed boxes saying "Buy this song from Amazon/iTunes" that comes up during some videos... I'm not objected to that as much as I am them fully removing videos... though I wish it showed as a button underneath the video, and not an ad they plaster on top of it)