Peanuts Mashup, Copyright & Fair Use

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As I was reading through my emails the other day, I came across an interesting piece of information about a professor at Case Western Reserve that uses a fictional copyright infringement case and a blog to get students to think about fair use. The blog, as I was poking around it, has some interesting things that are worth reading. There is even a mention of one of the cases that I wrote about before on fair use and education. But, what I wanted to share from that blog was a video that was a mashup of the Charlie Brown Christmas Special and Outkast’s Hey Ya! In addition to being well done, I think that it is a good example of the transformative nature of these copyrighted materials.

In order to understand why it is, in my opinion, fair use, we need to look at the ways in which one can claim fair use.

The Copyright Act says that “fair use…for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.” So if you are commenting on or criticizing an item someone else has posted, you have a fair use right to quote. The law favors “transformative” uses — commentary, either praise or criticism, is better than straight copying — but courts have said that even putting a piece of an existing work into a new context (such as a thumbnail in an image search engine) counts as “transformative.”

The courts try to use four different ways to determine fair use. They are:

• The purpose and character of the use.
• The nature of the copyrighted work.
• The amount and substantiality of the portion used.
• The effect on the market or potential market.

So, when thinking about this particular video, you would definitely have to say that the purpose and character of the video has been changed significantly. That is, it has been transformed. While the authors of said video use the whole of the Outkast song, they do not use the entire Charlie Brown show. They use portions and string them together to make a video. Again, it has transformed the original work into something else. As they say on the EFF website for the effect on market “If you use the copied work in a way that substitutes for the original in the market, it’s unlikely to be a fair use; uses that serve a different audience or purpose are more likely fair.” The video obviously serves a different audience and purpose than the original. I could, however, see how Outkast might think that because their entire song is in the video that it might detract from someone buying the single or album because they could watch the mashup. That being said, the quality has been reduced significantly in such a manner that I, a non-legal scholar, would consider it transformative. I don’t know what else to say regarding the four elements, but I also think that if someone watches the video and likes the song they might actually go out and buy or download (hopefully legally) the song. This adds, I think, to the potential market and can be beneficial.

On a similar note, someone had commented on the fair use article that I link to above about fair use in education about some work that she is doing that would be worth checking out. So, hop on over to the Media Education Lab at Temple University. They have what looks like interesting articles to read and there is even a video to watch that has a PDF article that goes along with it called “The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy.”

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Filed under Friday Levity, Miscellaneous

Tags: copyright, fair use, Outkast, Peanuts