3 ms·

The music and movie studios have been so quick to push censorship laws lately and they don't even realize those same laws might turn back against them later. "

The music and movie studios have been so quick to push censorship laws lately and they don't even realize those same laws might turn back against them later. "That's the real question: the copyright act balances the copyright owners' rights and not stifling the creativity of the owners - it would stifle creativity to not be able to make a parody," Mr. Harkins said." Such a shame you're not allowed to use someone else' songs on Youtube anymore for your own personalized videos. The same thing should apply here, too.

jrwoodruff 15y ago
IANL, but fair use would apply on your You Tube video. The problem is you'd have to have the bankroll to go to court against the music label. And you'd also want to be damn sure that your use of the song falls under parody or one of the other definitions of fair use.
- chopsueyar 15y ago
  Also, who says you have to host it on You Tube? Those are the policies of You Tube/Google, not necessarily US copyright law.
- tzs 15y ago
  Parody can be fair use. It isn't automatically fair use. There is a lot of misunderstanding of this on the net, largely due to the press doing their usual crappy job of reporting Supreme Court decisions when they covered the Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music case (the "Pretty Woman" case).
  - hugh3 15y ago
    There is a lot of misunderstanding of this on the net, largely due to the press doing their usual crappy job of reporting Supreme Court decisions when they covered the Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music case (the "Pretty Woman" case). And largely because people believe the law is either (a) whatever they think it should be or (b) whatever some other random jerk on the internet told 'em it was.
    - tzs 15y ago
      Yeah, but if the press didn't screw up it would be easier to combat that. There are two main errors the press makes repeatedly when reporting on the Supreme Court: 1. Not distinguishing between the Supreme Court taking a case and making a decision on the merits, and the Supreme Court not taking the case. There are only a few things the Supreme Court is required to hear. Most of their cases fall into categories that they are allowed to decide if they want to take them are not. There are many more cases vying for their attention than they can handle, so they tend to only take cases that raise important issues and that have been sufficiently explored in the lower courts. When they do not take a case, it (1) does not set any precedent, and (2) does not indicate what they think of the merits. Yet the press often reports these rejections as if the Supreme Court decided on the merits that the appealing party was wrong. 2. Not understanding the history of the case and what the Supreme Court's decision means in the context of that history. In Campbell, for instance, one the issue of whether the parody of Roy Orbison's song was fair use, the district court said that since it was parody it was automatically fair use and granted summary judgement for the defendant. The appeals court said the fact that it was commercial and copied the whole song meant it could not be fair use. The Supreme Court basically said they were both wrong. Parody isn't automatically fair use, but being commercial and using all of the song doesn't automatically make it not fair use. The case was sent back down for the lower courts to analyze using the guidelines the Supreme Court set out. However, the parties settled, so we never got to see how the lower courts would apply those guidelines.
chopsueyar 15y ago
The double-edged sword has been helpful in educating judges. The tactics of the MAFIAAs against P2P 'infringers' is also being used by attorneys of adult pornography content producers. As the type of content needing protection against infringers changes to pr0n, we are seeing more support on the part of the judicial system in balancing the rights of the accused against the MAFIAAs and pr0n IP defenders. Now that you mention it, fair-use as parody will probably be a valid defense.
- tzs 15y ago
  Down voted for MAFIAA. It's as stupid as M$ in adult discussions.
  - chopsueyar 15y ago
    Give me the proper regex and I will edit my above commment. But, thanks for calling my use of an acronym 'stupid'. Very articulate.
    - jemfinch 15y ago
      It's RIAA/MPAA and "porn". The GP is right: you're communicating childishly.
      - burgerbrain 15y ago
        You know what's even more childish? Finding yourself unable to brush it off.
        jerf 15y ago
        Community standards do not enforce themselves. You're seeing community standards enforced here. (It should be pointed out that it is actually an attempt to do chopsueyar a favor; as it happens around here that sort of thing is generally likely to make their writing less persuasive, not more.)
tzs 15y ago
> Such a shame you're not allowed to use someone else' songs on Youtube anymore for your own personalized videos. If you could freely use anyone's music on your YouTube videos, wouldn't the net effect be that all music would be available for free to anyone? People would just get new songs as they are released, slap then on videos of their cats, and make them available on YouTube, where anyone could easily grab them, strip off the video, and have the song.
- chopsueyar 15y ago
  That does not sound like an easy process to me.
  - tzs 15y ago
    One the receiving side it is trivial once you download the video: ffmpeg -i source_video.avi -vn -ar 44100 -ac 2 -ab 192 -f mp3 sound.mp3 Or, for those who don't want to deal with the command line, a Google for "how to download music from youtube" will turn up numerous friendly programs to accomplish the task. Amusingly, there are a ton of YouTube videos explaining the process. :-) On the producing side, it would also be easy to automate. Ffmpeg can add audio to a video, and it can trim a video. You could easily have a long video of your cat, say 30 minutes, and write a shell script to take a directory of MP3 files, and for each find the length, pick a random section from your long cat video of the appropriate length, extract a section of that length, and add the audio. The script could then upload the video to YouTube, putting the artist and song name in the description, so that on the receiving side naming and basic tagging of the MP3 could be automated.
    - chopsueyar 15y ago
      Which version of ffmpeg?
- tzs 15y ago
  Could you down-voters explain yourselves, please?

jrwoodruff 15y ago

IANL, but fair use would apply on your You Tube video. The problem is you'd have to have the bankroll to go to court against the music label. And you'd also want to be damn sure that your use of the song falls under parody or one of the other definitions of fair use.

chopsueyar 15y ago
Also, who says you have to host it on You Tube? Those are the policies of You Tube/Google, not necessarily US copyright law.
tzs 15y ago
Parody can be fair use. It isn't automatically fair use. There is a lot of misunderstanding of this on the net, largely due to the press doing their usual crappy job of reporting Supreme Court decisions when they covered the Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music case (the "Pretty Woman" case).
- hugh3 15y ago
  There is a lot of misunderstanding of this on the net, largely due to the press doing their usual crappy job of reporting Supreme Court decisions when they covered the Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music case (the "Pretty Woman" case). And largely because people believe the law is either (a) whatever they think it should be or (b) whatever some other random jerk on the internet told 'em it was.
  - tzs 15y ago
    Yeah, but if the press didn't screw up it would be easier to combat that. There are two main errors the press makes repeatedly when reporting on the Supreme Court: 1. Not distinguishing between the Supreme Court taking a case and making a decision on the merits, and the Supreme Court not taking the case. There are only a few things the Supreme Court is required to hear. Most of their cases fall into categories that they are allowed to decide if they want to take them are not. There are many more cases vying for their attention than they can handle, so they tend to only take cases that raise important issues and that have been sufficiently explored in the lower courts. When they do not take a case, it (1) does not set any precedent, and (2) does not indicate what they think of the merits. Yet the press often reports these rejections as if the Supreme Court decided on the merits that the appealing party was wrong. 2. Not understanding the history of the case and what the Supreme Court's decision means in the context of that history. In Campbell, for instance, one the issue of whether the parody of Roy Orbison's song was fair use, the district court said that since it was parody it was automatically fair use and granted summary judgement for the defendant. The appeals court said the fact that it was commercial and copied the whole song meant it could not be fair use. The Supreme Court basically said they were both wrong. Parody isn't automatically fair use, but being commercial and using all of the song doesn't automatically make it not fair use. The case was sent back down for the lower courts to analyze using the guidelines the Supreme Court set out. However, the parties settled, so we never got to see how the lower courts would apply those guidelines.

chopsueyar 15y ago

The double-edged sword has been helpful in educating judges. The tactics of the MAFIAAs against P2P 'infringers' is also being used by attorneys of adult pornography content producers. As the type of content needing protection against infringers changes to pr0n, we are seeing more support on the part of the judicial system in balancing the rights of the accused against the MAFIAAs and pr0n IP defenders. Now that you mention it, fair-use as parody will probably be a valid defense.

tzs 15y ago
Down voted for MAFIAA. It's as stupid as M$ in adult discussions.
- chopsueyar 15y ago
  Give me the proper regex and I will edit my above commment. But, thanks for calling my use of an acronym 'stupid'. Very articulate.
  - jemfinch 15y ago
    It's RIAA/MPAA and "porn". The GP is right: you're communicating childishly.
    - burgerbrain 15y ago
      You know what's even more childish? Finding yourself unable to brush it off.
      - jerf 15y ago
        Community standards do not enforce themselves. You're seeing community standards enforced here. (It should be pointed out that it is actually an attempt to do chopsueyar a favor; as it happens around here that sort of thing is generally likely to make their writing less persuasive, not more.)

tzs 15y ago

> Such a shame you're not allowed to use someone else' songs on Youtube anymore for your own personalized videos. If you could freely use anyone's music on your YouTube videos, wouldn't the net effect be that all music would be available for free to anyone? People would just get new songs as they are released, slap then on videos of their cats, and make them available on YouTube, where anyone could easily grab them, strip off the video, and have the song.

chopsueyar 15y ago
That does not sound like an easy process to me.
- tzs 15y ago
  One the receiving side it is trivial once you download the video: ffmpeg -i source_video.avi -vn -ar 44100 -ac 2 -ab 192 -f mp3 sound.mp3 Or, for those who don't want to deal with the command line, a Google for "how to download music from youtube" will turn up numerous friendly programs to accomplish the task. Amusingly, there are a ton of YouTube videos explaining the process. :-) On the producing side, it would also be easy to automate. Ffmpeg can add audio to a video, and it can trim a video. You could easily have a long video of your cat, say 30 minutes, and write a shell script to take a directory of MP3 files, and for each find the length, pick a random section from your long cat video of the appropriate length, extract a section of that length, and add the audio. The script could then upload the video to YouTube, putting the artist and song name in the description, so that on the receiving side naming and basic tagging of the MP3 could be automated.
  - chopsueyar 15y ago
    Which version of ffmpeg?
tzs 15y ago
Could you down-voters explain yourselves, please?