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Video essay: product placement, fair use, and copyright law

Underseer

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[YOUTUBE]NNuGdv536mM[/YOUTUBE]

  • There's a difference between placing a product in a story and endorsing a product, which triggers vastly different laws.
  • In order to count as fair use, you have to say something about the copyrighted material in question, and use the bare minimum of copyrighted material to get your point across. A lot of those reaction videos that I watch probably violate the rules around fair use.
  • Not all of Weird Al's works count as parody/satire, because they don't actually comment on the song being covered.
    • Weird Al's cover of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit does fall under fair use because it makes fun of Kurt Cobain's elocution in the original song (e.g. the "marbles in my mouth" line).
    • Weird Al's cover of Michael Jackson's Beat It does not, as he simply uses the melody of the original song to talk about something else entirely (eating food).
    • This is why Weird Al always gets permission: just in case, since he's kind of skirting the boundary between fair use for the purposes of satire and copyright violation. Even when he is doing genuine satire of a song, he's using more of the copyrighted material than is strictly necessary to make his point.
  • She makes fun of Cheesecake Factory as a way of demonstrating fair use.

Since parody, satire, fair use, and copyright laws are often discussed around here, this seemed like a worthwhile topic.

Trigger Warning
At the beginning of the video, Lindsay makes fun of delicate right wing snowflakes who whine and cry about feminism. Don't click on the link and then blame me because you burst a vein and soiled yourself.​
 
Weird. It shows up just fine on my computer.

What OS and what browser are you using?

Are you using any script blockers?
 
Though Weird Al prefers to come up with his own parody ideas, he did make an exception:

"Like a surgeon / Cutting for the very first time / Like a sur-r-r-rgeon ..."
 
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