GoldieBlox is being sued for the use of the Beastie Boys song in this clip. Turns out in his will Adam Yauch specifically asked that their works not be used for commercial purposes and the band('s lawyers) are honoring that request. Goldieblox will probably try to argue Fair Use but I think they're likely f'd because the primary purpose of this video is to advertise their products (the social commentary is incidental), which violates one of the factors of analysis the courts use in determining infringement.

Article on the lawsuit: http://boingboing.net/2013/11/23/beastie-boys-send-copyright-th.html

Fair Use Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Some people can't take criticism. Especially bad when you got proof they gave permission before you made the video, and aren't doing things equally.

Some of the channels I watch are critical of Young Earth Creationists, proving how the YEC people are providing false witness by lying about the actual facts in an effort to confuse their audience into believing the Earth is only 6,000 year old, and they get take down notices all the time. In those cases it is fair use at play since the channels they are being shown on aren't getting revenue, and are educational. In TB's case, he had permission from the company, signed by the very guy who later complained.

As TB notes, this isn't really about him and his video though, but others who do the same thing who don't have a powerful network behind them to recover or fight, and has more to do with YouTube's default action, without giving proper recourse for the content maker to address it fairly, and of course the DMCA itself which is probably the core of the problem. Hopefully, if any of the videos he pointed out as still being up are taken down after he pointed them out, his Network will help those people.

The subject of Let's Play videos and their legality is a difficult one. TB's WTF videos are basically Let's Play with an initial impression. Even without a blanket and specific permission granted, they should be legal, as it is critique, not just a pure Let's Play without commentary of the entire game. I can see the argument against showing a large portion or entire game and monetizing it without permission, but a shorter Let's Play or critique should be fair, especially critique.

It should be noted that the Developers have since pulled their complaint to YouTube after the negative publicity. Gee... take down notice to one of the biggest YouTube game reviewers out there, somebody who's professional name and reputation is "cynical" and you don't think there would be fallout?

This bees a must-see!
I would guess that this debut-director's work is gonna launch a shitstorm from Disney once they figure out how to hang the guy but by then, the indelible, perceived damage to future patronage Disney paranoids may see to their parks from this guy's FAP will have been done-(Opens October 11, 2013)

"Though the filmmakers may have committed trespass when they broke Disney World's rules and if it violated the terms of entry on their tickets, the film itself is a different matter,"..."As commentary on the social ideals of Disney World, it seems to clearly fall within a well-recognized category of fair use, and therefore probably will not be stopped by a court using copyright or trademark laws."- Tim Wu, New Yorker, blog

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/escape-tomorrow-disneys-strategy-strategy-630906

It looks frikkin' hilarious and Disney deserves every bit of 'it', whatever 'that' is.

For those confused about the "wants the video deleted from the Internet" title, they removed it from their show and tried to file copyright claims to force it off Internet sites, but Right Wing Watch managed to get it back on under Fair Use.
http://gawker.com/pat-robertson-has-lost-his-fight-to-keep-gay-aids-ring-1314509544

RIAA is trying to kill this fair use project http://boingboing.net/2013/06/21/beastles-get-nuked-by-the-riaa.html

If anyone wants to read more about Stephen and LGBTQIA youth, here is the NYT article.

The New York Time's

Generation LGBTQIA

By MICHAEL SCHULMAN

Published: January 10, 2013

STEPHEN IRA, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, uploaded a video last March on We Happy Trans, a site that shares "positive perspectives" on being transgender.

In the breakneck six-and-a-half-minute monologue - hair tousled, sitting in a wood-paneled dorm room - Stephen exuberantly declared himself "a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist and a guy who needs a haircut," and held forth on everything from his style icons (Truman Capote and "any male-identified person who wears thigh-highs or garters") to his toy zebra.

Because Stephen, who was born Kathlyn, is the 21-year-old child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, the video went viral, garnering nearly half a million views. But that was not the only reason for its appeal. With its adrenalized, freewheeling eloquence, the video seemed like a battle cry for a new generation of post-gay gender activists, for whom Stephen represents a rare public face.

Armed with the millennial generation's defining traits - Web savvy, boundless confidence and social networks that extend online and off - Stephen and his peers are forging a political identity all their own, often at odds with mainstream gay culture.

If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question isn't whom they love, but who they are - that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.

But what to call this movement? Whereas "gay and lesbian" was once used to lump together various sexual minorities - and more recently "L.G.B.T." to include bisexual and transgender - the new vanguard wants a broader, more inclusive abbreviation. "Youth today do not define themselves on the spectrum of L.G.B.T.," said Shane Windmeyer, a founder of Campus Pride, a national student advocacy group based in Charlotte, N.C.

Part of the solution has been to add more letters, and in recent years the post-post-post-gay-rights banner has gotten significantly longer, some might say unwieldy. The emerging rubric is "L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," which stands for different things, depending on whom you ask.

"Q" can mean "questioning" or "queer," an umbrella term itself, formerly derogatory before it was appropriated by gay activists in the 1990s. "I" is for "intersex," someone whose anatomy is not exclusively male or female. And "A" stands for "ally" (a friend of the cause) or "asexual," characterized by the absence of sexual attraction.

It may be a mouthful, but it's catching on, especially on liberal-arts campuses.

The University of Missouri, Kansas City, for example, has an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Resource Center that, among other things, helps student locate "gender-neutral" restrooms on campus. Vassar College offers an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Discussion Group on Thursday afternoons. Lehigh University will be hosting its second annual L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Intercollegiate Conference next month, followed by a Queer Prom. Amherst College even has an L.G.B.T.Q.Q.I.A.A. center, where every group gets its own letter.

The term is also gaining traction on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where posts tagged with "lgbtqia" suggest a younger, more progressive outlook than posts that are merely labeled "lgbt."

"There's a very different generation of people coming of age, with completely different conceptions of gender and sexuality," said Jack Halberstam (formerly Judith), a transgender professor at the University of Southern California and the author, most recently, of "Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal."

"When you see terms like L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," Professor Halberstam added, "it's because people are seeing all the things that fall out of the binary, and demanding that a name come into being."

And with a plethora of ever-expanding categories like "genderqueer" and "androgyne" to choose from, each with an online subculture, piecing together a gender identity can be as D.I.Y. as making a Pinterest board.

BUT sometimes L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. is not enough. At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, eight freshmen united in the frustration that no campus group represented them.

Sure, Penn already had some two dozen gay student groups, including Queer People of Color, Lambda Alliance and J-Bagel, which bills itself as the university's "Jewish L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Community." But none focused on gender identity (the closest, Trans Penn, mostly catered to faculty members and graduate students).

Richard Parsons, an 18-year-old transgender male, discovered that when he attended a student mixer called the Gay Affair, sponsored by Penn's L.G.B.T. Center. "I left thoroughly disappointed," said Richard, a garrulous freshman with close-cropped hair, wire-framed glasses and preppy clothes, who added, "This is the L.G.B.T. Center, and it's all gay guys."

Through Facebook, Richard and others started a group called Penn Non-Cis, which is short for "non-cisgender." For those not fluent in gender-studies speak, "cis" means "on the same side as" and "cisgender" denotes someone whose gender identity matches his or her biology, which describes most of the student body. The group seeks to represent everyone else. "This is a freshman uprising," Richard said.

On a brisk Tuesday night in November, about 40 students crowded into the L.G.B.T. Center, a converted 19th-century carriage house, for the group's inaugural open mike. The organizers had lured students by handing out fliers on campus while barking: "Free condoms! Free ChapStick!"

"There's a really vibrant L.G.B.T. scene," Kate Campbell, one of the M.C.'s, began. "However, that mostly encompasses the L.G.B. and not too much of the T. So we're aiming to change that."

Students read poems and diary entries, and sang guitar ballads. Then Britt Gilbert - a punky-looking freshman with a blond bob, chunky glasses and a rock band T-shirt - took the stage. She wanted to talk about the concept of "bi-gender."

"Does anyone want to share what they think it is?"

Silence.

She explained that being bi-gender is like manifesting both masculine and feminine personas, almost as if one had a "detachable penis." "Some days I wake up and think, 'Why am I in this body?' " she said. "Most days I wake up and think, 'What was I thinking yesterday?' 

"Britt's grunginess belies a warm matter-of-factness, at least when describing her journey. As she elaborated afterward, she first heard the term "bi-gender" from Kate, who found it on Tumblr. The two met at freshman orientation and bonded. In high school, Kate identified as "agender" and used the singular pronoun "they"; she now sees her gender as an "amorphous blob."

By contrast, Britt's evolution was more linear. She grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and never took to gender norms. As a child, she worshiped Cher and thought boy bands were icky. Playing video games, she dreaded having to choose male or female avatars.

In middle school, she started calling herself bisexual and dated boys. By 10th grade, she had come out as a lesbian. Her parents thought it was a phase - until she brought home a girlfriend, Ash. But she still wasn't settled.

"While I definitely knew that I liked girls, I didn't know that I was one," Britt said. Sometimes she would leave the house in a dress and feel uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a Halloween costume. Other days, she felt fine. She wasn't "trapped in the wrong body," as the cliché has it - she just didn't know which body she wanted.

When Kate told her about the term "bi-gender," it clicked instantly. "I knew what it was, before I knew what it was," Britt said, adding that it is more fluid than "transgender" but less vague than "genderqueer" - a catchall term for nontraditional gender identities.

At first, the only person she told was Ash, who responded, "It took you this long to figure it out?" For others, the concept was not so easy to grasp. Coming out as a lesbian had been relatively simple, Britt said, "since people know what that is." But when she got to Penn, she was relieved to find a small community of freshmen who had gone through similar awakenings.

Among them was Richard Parsons, the group's most politically lucid member. Raised female, Richard grew up in Orlando, Fla., and realized he was transgender in high school. One summer, he wanted to room with a transgender friend at camp, but his mother objected. "She's like, 'Well, if you say that he's a guy, then I don't want you rooming with a guy,' " he recalled. "We were in a car and I basically blurted out, 'I think I might be a guy, too!' "

After much door-slamming and tears, Richard and his mother reconciled. But when she asked what to call him, he had no idea. He chose "Richard" on a whim, and later added a middle name, Matthew, because it means "gift of God."

By the time he got to Penn, he had been binding his breasts for more than two years and had developed back pain. At the open mike, he told a harrowing story about visiting the university health center for numbness and having a panic attack when he was escorted into a women's changing room.

Nevertheless, he praised the university for offering gender-neutral housing. The college's medical program also covers sexual reassignment surgery, which, he added, "has heavily influenced my decision to probably go under the Penn insurance plan next year."

PENN has not always been so forward-thinking; a decade ago, the L.G.B.T. Center (nestled amid fraternity houses) was barely used. But in 2010, the university began reaching out to applicants whose essays raised gay themes. Last year, the gay newsmagazine The Advocate ranked Penn among the top 10 trans-friendly universities, alongside liberal standbys like New York University.

More and more colleges, mostly in the Northeast, are catering to gender-nonconforming students. According to a survey by Campus Pride, at least 203 campuses now allow transgender students to room with their preferred gender; 49 have a process to change one's name and gender in university records; and 57 cover hormone therapy. In December, the University of Iowa became the first to add a "transgender" checkbox to its college application.

"I wrote about an experience I had with a drag queen as my application essay for all the Ivy Leagues I applied to," said Santiago Cortes, one of the Penn students. "And I got into a few of the Ivy Leagues - Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn. Strangely not Brown.

"But even these measures cannot keep pace with the demands of incoming students, who are challenging the curriculum much as gay activists did in the '80s and '90s. Rather than protest the lack of gay studies classes, they are critiquing existing ones for being too narrow.

Several members of Penn Non-Cis had been complaining among themselves about a writing seminar they were taking called "Beyond 'Will & Grace,' " which examined gay characters on shows like "Ellen," "Glee" and "Modern Family." The professor, Gail Shister, who is a lesbian, had criticized several students for using "L.G.B.T.Q." in their essays, saying it was clunky, and proposed using "queer" instead. Some students found the suggestion offensive, including Britt Gilbert, who described Ms. Shister as "unaccepting of things that she doesn't understand."

Ms. Shister, reached by phone, said the criticism was strictly grammatical. "I am all about economy of expression," she said. "L.G.B.T.Q. doesn't exactly flow off the tongue. So I tell the students, 'Don't put in an acronym with five or six letters.' "

One thing is clear. Ms. Shister, who is 60 and in 1979 became The Philadelphia Inquirer's first female sportswriter, is of a different generation, a fact she acknowledges freely, even gratefully. "Frankly, I'm both proud and envious that these young people are growing up in an age where they're free to love who they want," she said.

If history is any guide, the age gap won't be so easy to overcome. As liberated gay men in the 1970s once baffled their pre-Stonewall forebears, the new gender outlaws, to borrow a phrase from the transgender writer Kate Bornstein, may soon be running ideological circles around their elders.

Still, the alphabet soup of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. may be difficult to sustain. "In the next 10 or 20 years, the various categories heaped under the umbrella of L.G.B.T. will become quite quotidian," Professor Halberstam said.

Even at the open mike, as students picked at potato chips and pineapple slices, the bounds of identity politics were spilling over and becoming blurry.

At one point, Santiago, a curly-haired freshman from Colombia, stood before the crowd. He and a friend had been pondering the limits of what he calls "L.G.B.T.Q. plus."

"Why do only certain letters get to be in the full acronym?" he asked.

Then he rattled off a list of gender identities, many culled from Wikipedia. "We have our lesbians, our gays," he said, before adding, "bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual." He took a breath and continued. "Pansexual. Omnisexual. Trisexual. Agender. Bi-gender. Third gender. Transgender. Transvestite. Intersexual. Two-spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous."

By now, the list had turned into free verse. He ended: "Undecided. Questioning. Other. Human."

The room burst into applause.

Correction: January 10, 2013, Thursday

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article and a picture caption referred incorrectly to a Sarah Lawrence College student who uploaded a video online about being transgender. He says he is Stephen Ira, not Stephen Ira Beatty.

Source NYT

Fair Use

This would definitely fall into the category of fair use anyways.

Check this one out: http://videosift.com/video/Understanding-Copyright-Law-and-Exclusive-Rights

In reply to this comment by lampishthing:
I've gotta know, how on earth did you come across this video?

I studied Mass Media and Law, Journalism 487, with professor John Bender at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

>> ^lampishthing:

I've gotta know, how on earth did you come across this video?

http://videosift.com/video/Fair-Use-Copyrights

http://videosift.com/video/Fair-Use-Copyrights#comment-1504047

Yeah, we can argue fair use all day with small or even longer clips from things, but when we have something in its entirety, it's hard to argue it, especially since we have our own self-censoring on that particular issue.

I remember a stream of the entirety of Star Trek TNG was posted a while back, but that's sort of an weird case, since it's a stream.

I also remember lots of ye olde filme that's been posted, but once we go over a certain time and enter the abandonware time, the rules get a little more lax.

Local library here is pretty good, you can do almost everything online and get a fairly good selection of books online. For those not online you can have them transferred to your local library for pick up...along with a lot of other stuff.


Their main branch is kind of a pain to go to because it's downtown and the parking situation sucks at times, with fairly expensive parking lots or meters. And it houses some things you can only get see on those premises such as family trees and rare books/etc.

They updated the online catalog software to suit what people wanted just recently.

They run a whole lot of learn-to classes, speakers, etc. I haven't seen any of those I was particularly interested in, but still cool to see them make the effort. I think their primary crowd on these are more in the older age brackets or kids.

I believe they could offer a more robust online selection, but I have this nagging feeling that the book publishers discourage this via pricing and weird restrictions that they may not be able to comply with or unwilling.

Libraries are a pretty big opponent to restriction of freedoms to the individual granted under fair use. Without fair use they probably wouldn't exist....and we know the copyright groups have been actively pushing for more restrictions on fair use. I wouldn't be too surprised if they were behind library budgets being slashed dramatically in many locations. The budget for libraries is probably paltry compared to a lot of other things that didn't get axed.

Wow I hadn't actually watched the video when I made my last comment so I didn't realize the extent of use here. But considering they didn't just use it once and park it at their house and return it the next day your argument falls apart. They repeatedly used it to run errands and were obviously joyriding at high speeds in some segments this guy will be lucky if all he gets is a UUMV charge. And even if his contract does cover this sort of use with customer cars one thing I know from watching civil court TV is that you can't write a contract that essentially allows you to break the law and then go back later and claim it's the other parties fault for not reading the contract. If you break the law you break the law end of story and with the footage they have this guy has zero chance of getting off the hook here.

[edit] Though your right without the video it might be harder to prove and it might have ended up in civil court rather than criminal court though I would think even a civil court Judge would realize this was way beyond fair use. And most car parking companies wouldn't include "special" language in their contracts to cover their asses. It would seem to me that the contract itself would be incriminating at that point.

>> ^Porksandwich:

>> ^Auger8:
In Texas they would charge you with "Unauthorized Use of a Motor Vehicle" or a UUMV which is different than Grand Theft Auto. So say I live with a room mate and he has access to my keys cause I leave them on a peg in my kitchen or something and maybe I've even let him use it before but not this time, this time he takes my car to the store when I'm asleep and crashes it or doesn't return for a few days. That's what the charge would be since he didn't really "steal" it he just used it without asking me. I believe it's a either a high class Misdemeanor or the Lowest Class Felony. Sorry for the run-on sentence there not sure how to word that differently lol.
>> ^Porksandwich:
Is there anything they can even charge the guy with though? I mean you are leaving your car with them and giving it over to their care.......so I am betting their paperwork covers their ass for this kind of stuff if it should arise.
I guess the only thing you could possibly do is try to get them on the personal use stuff. Like the hauling of wood, peeling out on dirt roads, etc.


Still betting their agreement has language to cover a very broad number of reasons for them to move your vehicle. Without the video evidence, he could say he took it home because security chased off someone messing with it the night before.
I mean if you sign something saying "it's OK to...." and then they do something that could be construed to fall under that. You've got a much larger argument to be made, IE you entered into a bad agreement and they took advantage of you versus them just behaving beyond the normal for that kind of business.
I'm not saying this guy isn't an absolute dirt bag and deserves someone to beat him soundly for using their vehicle in an asshole way, but......I'm just not seeing it happen in a court of law knowing that no one is going to watch your car without an agreement you sign if you're leaving your keys with them during it. Long term parking is different because you park it yourself and are in charge of handling whatever comes up problem wise with it...never seen a written agreement in that scenario. There the people working the lot getting your car (no keys or keys) would be obviously unauthorized use and not outright theft since it was there when you got back.

>> ^Fletch:

I wish he would have dubbed the source music over the top of the boombox audio. Or would that fall within YouTube's definition of improper use?
if 'fair use' doesn't apply here then the music owners would be idiots for pulling down these videos.