Two professors at the American University’s Center for Social Media have published a new 18-page study, “Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyright Material in User-Generated Video.”
Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi looked at thousands of videos on 75 online platforms and concluded that the aggressive efforts by big media companies are threatening “fair use” and discouraging creativity on the Internet. The duo also have a blog to promote the discussion forward, which includes calls for a committee of scholars, legal experts, and content producers to figure out standards of acceptable “fair use.”
The study comes in the wake of several high-profile lawsuits, including Viacom’s $1 billion legal challenge against YouTube, and the rising popularity of so-called “mashups” on user-generated sites like MySpace. Both professors want the industry to accept a wide variety of practices—satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and pastiche or collage — as legitimate times to use copyrighted work.
