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Have also wondered about this. At this point it must be well understood/accepted that clips this small fall under "fair use" (or else there would have been a ma
by nategri 7y ago
Have also wondered about this. At this point it must be well understood/accepted that clips this small fall under "fair use" (or else there would have been a major legal sh*tstorm by now) but I would LOVE it if someone could chime in with specifics.
- henryfjordan 7y agoIANAL but basically, yeah this is probably mostly Fair Use. You consider a few factors to determine if something is Fair Use, like what the work was originally, how much was copied, and what was done with it. For a GIF from a movie that gets put into an email/slack, you're looking at a tiny portion being used in a different format that isn't being sold directly but rather just part of emails. If a copyright holder cared, they might be able to get an injunction stopping a company from using GIFs of their characters in promotional emails. They probably wouldn't get anything in terms of damages as what harm really occurred? It's not like I saw a gif and didn't need to see the whole movie. There might be statutory damages but those usually require bad faith which would be hard to argue. StartupGIFs might be less fair use-y though. If they are selling access to the gifs or otherwise using it for marketing purposes, now there is money that can be directly tied to the use of GIF, which is a factor that is considered in Fair Use AND an argument to be used for damages.