YouTube and Fair Use

MediaCommons holds among its founding principles not simply a defense of "fair use" as it stands, but a commitment to the expansion of our understanding of fair use for a new scholarly age, believing strongly as we do that unless our understanding of fair use grows, its sphere of influence will of necessity shrink, hemmed in by corporate interests that seek to enforce a culture of permission wherever free borrowing occurs. We feel strongly that scholars must be free and able to quote from the materials they study without requesting permission, that such quotation in the service of analysis is of necessity "transformative," and that the use of such quotation practices enhances, rather than detracting from, the market value of the original text. This position underwrites existing projects such as In Media Res, as well as the kinds of projects we hope to support in the future. 

This position, however, is not without its risks. This time last year, IMR temporarily lost a lot of content in the course of a YouTube purge (fortunately, we'd backed up nearly everything, but such backups are of course a labor-intensive process). Almost a year to the day later, Kevin B. Lee had an entire archive of video essays he'd produced disappear in a similar purge. Due perhaps in part to Matt Zoller Seitz's strongly worded critique of YouTube and defense of Lee's transformative practices, Kevin's had his YouTube account restored, though his lessons learned post indicates the chilling effect that such a move on the part of copyright enforcers can produce. What does this bode for MediaCommons? How can we as a community simultaneously work to protect our interests and work toward the expansion of fair use practices? We hope that we can begin with a discussion of these issues, in order to determine what our position as a community is and ought to be, and to put in place the safeguards that will protect our work from the interference produced by undue claims of copyright violation.