Some of you may be familiar with the term ‘Fair Use’ as it relates to copyrights. Fair Use allows creators to use content they did not generate in their own content with education, critique, parody, criticism, etc in mind. Claiming fair use means you are not attempting to lay claim to something, but are using it to illustrate a point, comment on, or otherwise use the content in a transformative way.
Youtube creators have been fighting DMCA claims where their content clearly falls under fair use. Sometimes these claims are made by someone who is well intentioned, and other times it is done out of spite to simply have the video taken down for whatever reason. But today Youtube made the first move in helping to protect creators in a statement made by Google. They will be offering legal services to some creators battling fair use DMCA claims, up to $1 million. While this will certainly be a small number of creators at first, it’s refreshing to see a company making steps to assist creatives.
Hopefully this will spur better claim processes, and a better understanding of fair use in the future. Another hope is that this will help stem the use of DMCA claims made simply to attack a creator and/or their message. But we’ll have to wait and see.
Conventioning 