"Fair use" is pretty specific. Most interpretations allow to use a clip in your work. But if we are taking about a clip of a movie on its own, like the first 10 minutes, without any transformative addition/change, I don't see a "fair use" defense.
My sole encounter with the Youtube copyright police came from posting a two minute, highly edited visual commentary on the film Inception (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6rLEzrWzCw), pointing out the religious allusions to Matthew 7.24 and the allegorical significance of the final scene.
It was auto-flagged by their system and I had to jump through hoops to get it back online. I can't imagine this sort of thing would survive SOPA. And what other platform is there but the Internet for the sharing of multimedia commentary and criticism?
YouTube isn't the Internet, BTW. I know people have forgotten how to do this, but it is possible to host videos on your own Web site. In that case you probably would have been left alone, or you might have received a DMCA takedown which you could easily defuse with a counter-notice.
Sure I could have hosted it one of my servers, but that isn't the same any more than posting a couple of links in an Apache directory is the same as sharing it on Reddit or Facebook. And am I supposed to be maintaining a fulltime blog on film criticism in order to share a single video with an audience of people who might care?
There's no sane reason we should lose the visibility, distribution and community relevance of social platforms simply in exchange for exercising fair use of something. That said, the point was less about Youtube being unfair and more about how these platforms are already heavily biased against the assumption of fair use.
The fact that you were able to get your video back up, (and remains up at the current moment) is testament that this is a decent, but not perfect, solution.
And its better than letting Congress enact SOPA, which is my whole my point upward in this thread. I know that's not saying much, but SOPA supporters claim that we can't (or won't) offer any alternatives to SOPA. Since Congress is always in the mindset of "we have to do something", let's give them an alternative that they can support that shows "something is being done".
I agree. I was responding more to what I read (perhaps incorrectly) as the insinuation that fair use is well-defined and well-protected. I had read this as implying that it would consequently be protected under SOPA as well.
Educators are allowed to use movies in their entirety for face-to-face teaching situations. I am a teacher, and our school librarians are quite well-informed on the specifics of fair use for educators.
Youtube has private ("unlisted") videos. I don't see why teachers couldn't use this so they can show it in class and give links to their students to view at home.
How do you know somebody isn't using that clip in their work? Embedding videos in the middle of documents is very popular online...
Fair use may be defined in specific terms (rather debatable... "most interpretations" indeed.), but determining if a particular use is fair use is not a science.
Hmm, I suppose in this hypothetical example, I know that this somebody isn't using that clip in their work because I specified "on its own" and "without any transformative addition/change".
If you are embedding the video in the middle of a document, its clearly not on its own and has been added to. However, if you embed 10 minutes of a video in the middle of your document, now that might be too much to be considered fair use.
I think your point is that a weaknesses of the algorithm I proposed is that media considered "fair use" could be flagged as infringing. My response to that is that Google already has procedures for dealing with images/videos that were questionably reported as offensive.
