'Fair Use'

With our topic this week of copyright/ copy left I most resonated with the movie we watched in class, RiP: A Remix Manifesto. I have always noticed how intense copyright laws can be in seemingly random cases, such as certain YouTube videos. One of the most interesting points I took from the film was the idea of ‘fair use’. Fair use is copying anything that is copyrighted but using it only in a way to comment upon, critique, or try to explain the content in a different light. This seems to fundamentally be the only leeway that copyright has. I find this concept to be very powerful but this idea caused me to question how all of the content that is shared and re-shared on social media, and how much really qualifies as ‘fair use’.

While researching farther into this topic I came across an article from Forbes titled ‘Fair Use in the Age of Social Media’ which describes the different ways that the fair use law may not be being used fairly in social media. A point in this article that I had not yet thought of was that using copyrighted work in our online conversations is not fair use. What comes to my mind when I think of this point is not only the conversations I have with my friends where I am often sending pictures or memes that are not mine, but also the endless content that is posted online by hundreds of different accounts. Unless those phots are posted in an attempt to share new ideas or open a discussion about the copyrighted work, it will not constitute as fair use. What strikes me most about the things I learned from this article is that I had not really considered any of this before learning about fair use and furthering my knowledge of copyrighted work as a whole. I think that may be the case for many people which to me is sort of frightening, to think of all the people who may accidentally and unknowingly get themselves in trouble.