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| Kennedy Space Center, FL, 2015 |
Leonard French and Lawful Masses channel considers the
Malmann v. Thunderf00t litigation with regard to Fair Use.
Apparently an 18-second video of a space launch made
by Ars Technica journalist Trevor Mahlmann was “ripped” without paying the
minimum $750 license that he normally requires for his video photography to help
make a living, by science journalist Thunderf00t. Text articles on this case don’t exist yet, but
French’s video makes some points on Fair Use.
For review, look at Columbia law school on the topic.
The most interesting point, from my perspective, is
the contextual or “meta-content’ analysis of the first prong of Fair Use. If the “ripper” was using the excerpt to
transform or do critical analysis of another presentation, that weighs toward Fair
Use. But if it simply is a copy of
someone else’s “creative” presentation of the facts of a news story (here a space
launch or landing – back in vogue today because of Mars) then it is not
transformative, and the normal expectation of the original owner to collect
license fees (to make a living) will be honored. That’s particularly the case with music,
video, or photography.
This in my mind raises a question of what happens when
a journalist places themselves in a Zoom box on a video and then shows
newspaper or periodical commentary in order to discuss the misbehavior or hypocrisy
of various politicians (you know, the “vengeful Left”). If the youtuber is commenting on the journalism
on the news story reported, that’s Fair, but not if they are letting the photographed
video article provide the content, so it wounds.
I don’t do this very often, but in one video recently where I discussed the threat of coronavirus lockdowns again from variants, I did show a few graphs from the Hopkins tracker to look at whether cases are really still coming down. (Hint: now they are flattening again at a high level, and that’s disturbing). I think that’s probably OK because there’s really no other reasonable way to present the graphs. (I could be critical of that site – it doesn’t fit into mobile too well, and is very slow).
Update: French has an update, March 9, link.
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