Is Criticism Fair use

RobertNoerr

New Member
I understand the importance of copyrighted material being protected.

But the idea of fair use, and what Youtubes rules are on this are very vague. Clearly Youtube for legal reasons will err on the side of removing things that are in a grey area, but I was hoping to get some answers to some specific fair use situations.

I have read that criticism can fall into the realm of fair use. For example, I can show a portion of an article that was created and copyrighted by someone else, and criticize it.

Is this true.

So for example, if I do a video on a New York Times article, and show and read five or six paragraphs of that article, and then spend 10 minutes criticizing it, is that fair use in general, and does youtube allow that?

And is there a difference between posting portions of written material that your criticize on a video vs. video material?

For example, if I post a clip of a fox news host, and I spend far more time than the actual clip from the show criticizing what was said, is that allowed?

Thanks for the help
 
There are no set rules or guidelines and only a judge can declare what is fair use.

Read the four factors of fair use (or talk to a copyright lawyer) and figure if what you want to do should be safe or not... and then decide if, as a worst case scenario, you would be willing to battle the NYT, Fox News, or similar in court to prove it - knowing they will likely have far deeper pockets and better lawyers than you.
 
To be fair use you need to ad a significant amount of value adding commentary to the copyrighted material. Like say if you played a 5 min clip from at tv show and then after the clip you spend 10 seconds saying why you like or dislike that clip it would not be fair use however using a small portion to help describe something your talking about may be ok. But the focus of the video needs to be on what you are creating vrs the copyrighted material
 
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