Fair Use and YouTube

Finally getting around to posting this on here after a few of us talked about it after class last week:

YouTube tends to be kind of strict when it comes to copyrights on music used in the background of videos. I used to make a lot of videos with Call of Duty and different games, and YouTube started disabling the audio from my videos completely because it contained “copy-written  material”.

I don’t remember how I found it, but I ended up finding this paragraph about fair use:

~FAIR USE~ Copyright Disclaimer
Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

If you post that in the dispute form for audio being disabled, most of the time they’ll put it back up for you. I’m not really sure which specific part of it would be the part applicable. Maybe the non-profit or personal use part?

Owen wanted me to post a link to one of the videos I used Fair Use to dispute, so here’s a link to one. Any Battlefield 3 fans? 😛

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPCImPBVPfQ

Anyways, I always thought it was pretty cool. Normally when I think of copyright laws I don’t think of anything that would really be too applicable to stuff I used to do in my spare time.

-Grant