Thanks for the comment. :) I appreciate Howard passing my work along to you! He’s a nice guy. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts here.

Obviously, I’m not an attorney, this is just my opinion from my experience. I tackle these issues from a community management perspective as opposed to an attorney perspective – so it’s good to have multiple perspectives. :)

I would say that the YouTube example is not a good one because it is a feature on YouTube that is enabled by the uploader and is cleared in their TOS, I’m sure. The main way it would be a violation is if the uploader did not have the rights to upload the work in the first place, in which case the uploader should be reported by the copyright holder and would likely bare any responsibility; with anyone who embedded it likely being fine.

Whereas, for example, ESPN does not say “embed this article, here’s some code!” So, if you copy and paste the whole article, you’re violating something – it’s not reasonable to cite YouTube as a defense for that, I don’t think.

I appreciate your system. It sounds like it could work in practice for your blog. Ikcy is one way to say it! :) But in my case, I wanted to set an easily definable standard that my staff and members could respect. Icky can vary by person, but 1/5 or 1/6 is pretty much the same from person to person.

I don’t know if it has failed us yet, but to be safe, I’ll say it’s worked in 99% of cases. There are different ways to go about it and this is not the only way; this is just one that has proven practical given my experience using it for many years.

I appreciate your time and thanks again for the comment.

Patrick

Blogs and social sharing are doing some interesting things to fair use. As tools like “share this,” embedding, and quote posts have become so common place on the web we are seeing a greater flexibility in what may be considered fair use. For example, on my blog Mintz’s Wordz I do a lot of embedding of YouTube videos (most recently a bunch of Steve Jobs Keynotes). Now the displaying of these videos on my blog theoretically violates some of the rights of the copyright holder (a copyright or any property right can be compared to “bundle of sticks” – each stick can represent a different right in what we understand to be the bundle called “the copyright”). But given the embedding features on YouTube, the prevalence with which others embed such videos, and the unlikelihood of anyone following up on such postings – copyright culture is changing.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t enforce fair use policies or that copyright holders should allow everyone to freely take their work (unless that is your thing). What it means is we need to rethink what it means to permit “fair use” in a viral media landscape. How much is fair? Personally, I use a very sophisticated system for determining things like fair use, ethics, etc. It’s called “the icky factor.” If it feels icky, you might want to rethink doing it, because in a connected world ickiness gets sniffed out pretty quickly and can frustrate any benefits you may have thought to reap by being icky.