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| Chilling Effects Clearinghouse > DMCA Notices > Weather Reports > Takedown of the Week: YouTube and Lionsgate Films Continue to Ban Paradigmatic Example of Fair Use | 
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|  Takedown of the Week: YouTube and Lionsgate Films Continue to Ban Paradigmatic Example of Fair UseAdam Holland, January 10, 2013 Abstract: Jonathan McIntosh’s celebrated remix, Buffy vs. Edward has been a classic example of a fair use for years. Nevertheless, at the end of 2012, it was blocked from YouTube due to a copyright claim from Lionsgate Films. Despite McIntosh’s best efforts to make the parties aware of the facts, and of the video’s clearly fair use of the material in question, the video remains down.
In 2009, Jonathan McIntosh, remix artist, new media educator and fair use advocate, made a remix video, Buffy vs. Edward: Twilight Remixed (which you can still see many other places, including here, with explanatory pop-ups, ) that used clips from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and from the Twilight movies to comment on the misogynistic portrayal of male/female sexual relationships in Twilight. The remix video, described as a “pro-feminist visual critique “ was a smashing success, and became an iconic example of fair use. In fact, in October, the U.S. Copyright Office cited it in their 2012 Report as “an example of a transformative noncommercial video work” that was fair use. What had changed? Why was the video, which had been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, and presumably had been monitored by YouTube’s internal copyright software, ContentID, suddenly a problem? That question is probably easy to answer. Originally, the rights to the Twilight films had been owned by Summit Entertainment. Summit apparently had no issues with McIntosh’s use of their film’s clips, or if they did, presumably resolved them internally. But, Summit was purchased by Lionsgate Films in January 2012, making Lionsgate the new rightsholders, and presumably leading to changes in the way in which YouTube monitored its videos for infringement’s of Lionsgate’s rights. It isn’t clear why it took nine months for Lionsgate to start trying to assert their rights. This is bad enough, but it’s the chaos that ensued when McIntiosh tried to have the video reinstated that reveals the extent to which the system is broken, the dangers of software-based evaluations of copyright infringement, and finally, why consideration of fair use is so critical. The most tragicomic piece of all this is that (of course) the video is still up in a variety of locations, including on YouTube. so what’s in this for Lionsgate, other than beautifully reifying Emersonian principles? McIntosh meticulously describes the full story here, in an excellent post for Ars Technica, and it really is a must-read for anyone interested in copyright law and fair use. Draw your own conclusions, but be sure to ask yourself what other iconic pieces of culture aren’t coming up in your search results because of this sort of thing. [UPDATED: 2013/01/11 McIntosh < ahref = "https://twitter.com/radicalbytes/status/289707110944620544"> tweets that the video is back up.]
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