What Is Fair Use? Critical Commons Can Tell You

If you have ever wondered if you can use a certain film clip or still in your teaching or research, and found yourself censoring yourself because you were afraid of copyright violation, check out the resources at Critical Commons, a project dedicated to teaching us about what does and does not constitute fair use for educational and research purposes. Here's the url: http://criticalcommons.org

Critical Commons is directed by media scholar Steve Anderson at USC and is a winner of one of the first round of Digital Media and Competition grants. 

They've just done a parody that makes the point of what constitutes fair use by repurposing in the role of digital humanities and digital humanities one of the most oft-parodied and repurposed bits of media in the world.   You have probably all seen these parodic/repurposed uses of Bruno Ganz's histrionic rendition of Hitler in Downfall.   All the shocked and horrified faces!  All Ganz's over-the-top acting.  It's camp, of course, and that is the inter-textual point that Anderson is making:  to parody requires fair use.   What happens in a world where fair use no longer exists?   It virtually puts YouTube out of business, for one thing!

Check out what Critical Commons has done with this particularly famous bit of film making,  with all of its overacted reaction shots and so forth, all put in service of Digital Humanities.  It is either offensive or hilariously funny, depending on your point of view, but the point is that parody almost always brings up issues of fair use.    THAT is the point about fair use, and it makes for a very clever video.  Check it out!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VREJV--VHSw