The OTW belatedly joins in celebrating the restoration of Glockgal's Avatar site on Zazzle. As you may remember, Glockgal's store was TOSed ostensibly for violating Viacom's intellectual property rights, even though Glockgal's items were mostly textual expressions of her critique of the all-white casting of the new live-action Avatar film. Viacom was quick to assert that they support fair use and only take things down when they aren't creative or political; they also invited Glockgal to submit a DMCA counternotice. The OTW was happy to help Glockgal formulate and direct that counternotice, and we have been so delighted to see people from all around the internet banding together to take a stand against unfair takedowns. This (relatively speedy!) victory is a victory for all of us and proof that banding together and defending our rights works.

The takeaway? If someone is infringing YOUR free speech or fair use rights, SAY SOMETHING. TELL SOMEONE!

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

American University’s Center for Social Media and AU's Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, in collaboration with Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project, have launched a new video explaining how online video creators can make remixes, mashups, and other common online video genres with the knowledge that they are staying within copyright law.

The video, titled Remix Culture: Fair Use Is Your Friend, explains the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video (which was worked on by OTW's very own Rebecca Tushnet). Like the code, the video identifies various kinds of unlicensed uses of copyrighted material that may be considered fair, under certain limitations. Of particular interest to vidders and fannish remix artists might be: "commenting or critiquing of copyrighted material", "use for illustration or example", "use to launch a discussion", and "recombining to make a new work, such as a mashup or a remix, whose elements depend on relationships between existing works."



Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.