The Electronic Frontier Foundation (the EFF as opposed to the EFA) has issued six principles that copyright holders should consider before trying to remove a piece of content:
Online video hosting services like YouTube are ushering in a new era of free expression online. By providing a home for "user-generated content" (UGC) on the Internet, these services enable creators to reach a global audience without having to depend on traditional intermediaries like television networks and movie studios. The result has been an explosion of creativity by ordinary people, who have enthusiastically embraced the opportunities created by these new technologies to express themselves in a remarkable variety of ways.
The life blood of much of this new creativity is fair use, the copyright doctrine that permits unauthorized uses of copyrighted material for transformative purposes. Creators naturally quote from and build upon the media that makes up our culture, yielding new works that comment on, parody, satirize, criticize, and pay tribute to the expressive works that have come before. These forms of free expression are among those protected by the fair use doctrine.
New video hosting services can also be abused, however. Copyright owners are legitimately concerned that a substantial number works posted to some UGC video sites are simply unauthorized, verbatim copies of their works. Some of these rightsholders have sued service providers, and many utilize the "notice-and-takedown" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to remove videos that they believe are infringing. At the same time, a broad consensus has emerged among major copyright owners that fair use must be accommodated even as steps are taken to address copyright infringement.
Content owners and service providers have indicated their mutual intention to protect and preserve fair use in the UGC context, even as they move forward with efforts to address copyright concerns. The following principles are meant to provide concrete steps that they can and should take to minimize the unnecessary, collateral damage to fair use as they move forward with those efforts.
Read the principles here. These principles have also been endorsed by:
- Center for Social Media, School of Communications, American University
- Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, Washington College of Law, American University
- Public Knowledge
- Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School
- ACLU of Northern California
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