Question of the Month

In this Fair Use Question of the Month, a documentary filmmaker has questions about the best way to include YouTube videos taken at the recent Tea Party rallies in his upcoming documentary.

Question:

Dear Center for Social Media,Read more...

Question:

Dear Center for Social Media:

I’m a video production professor, and my students do a great little assignment where they re-edit a scene from a movie. Sometimes they’re very funny. We’d like to show them in the university-wide film festival, and send the students home at the end of the year with a DVD compilation of them. I’m even thinking they’d make a nice promotional item for our program. Read more...

I've made a video where I claim fair use on a film clip that features a celebrity. I'm confident that it's fair use--I've transformed it from its original context, and been careful to take just the amount I needed. I hope to release this work commercially. But can the celebrity then say "I acknowledge the clip was protected by fair use, but using my likeness to make money from this film isn't fair use"? In other words, does a celebrity's right to benefit from his or her likeness trump a filmmaker's fair use rights? Read more...

QUESTION:

Dear Center for Social Media,

I have a question that touches on point four of the Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Online Video. I own and play a game called Audiosurf. The game uses songs as a base and creates game levels based on the properties of the song such as BPM, pitch etc. Each level is the length of the song chosen and the player plays it in a Guitar Hero like game play, with varying game modes changing how it's actually played.Read more...

QUESTION:

Dear Center for Social Media,Read more...