Fair Use For Me, But Not For Thee

from the funny-how-that-works dept

Here's a wacky one. Blogger Mark Reinhardt, who blogs about Idaho, had written a blog post critical of local TV station KTVB and its news reporting. With it, he included a YouTube clip of the reporting in question, along with some of his own commentary about why the reporting was "one sided journalism." While the disclaimer he posted with it, which implied that he believed the use was fair use, was legally meaningless (and slightly incorrect), using a news clip and commenting on it is still a classic form of fair use. Either way, KTVB claimed the video and had YouTube take it down, saying it was infringing. Whether or not it was actually infringing is actually not a huge part of the issue, because what happened next was interesting.

Mark Reinhardt remembered that, last year, KTVB had used one of his videos to illustrate a story. Amazingly, they didn't even credit it to him, but generally to "YouTube." So, he went tit for tat, and sent KTVB an email demanding that they remove his video (or, that they properly credit him). There are, of course, a number of legal problems with his particular notice. It does not meet the requirements of a proper DMCA takedown notice (not even close). Also, while he's emailing KTVB, he only provides them with a YouTube link, rather than the link of the story. If he wants the video taken down from YouTube (unlikely, since it's his video), then he needs to alert YouTube. If he wants it off of KTVB's site, then he needs to file a compliant DMCA notice pointing to the KTVB story. Of course, KTVB would have a number of reasonable defenses (including fair use and implied license, given that the video was on YouTube with embedding enabled).

Either way, it does seem rather interesting that the news channel issued a takedown on his use of their video, when it had no problems running one of his videos without credit.

Filed Under: copyright, embedding, fair use, idaho, ktvb, mark reinhardt, videos