Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Fair use question of the day

Overthinkingit's deconstruction of Call Me Maybe, originally blocked on YouTube.  Maybe young Harvard guys are more acceptable than Foucault?  In comments, Fred von Lohmann speculates (disclaiming any specific knowledge) that perhaps Overthinkingit made use of YouTube's dispute resolution mechanism, but that would still leave the interesting question of why a stop-start rendition interspersed with commentary, which clearly couldn't function as a replacement for the official video, needed to use the dispute resolution mechanism when, for all that I can tell, the lipsyncing Harvard guys never did.  One possibility is that even with the commentary the use of some clips of the official video triggered an automatic filter because of the sound/video match.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Seems to be working now . . . .

Rebecca Tushnet said...

Good to hear, anonymous! The original Overthinkingit post said that it was blocked on YouTube and thus was on Vimeo instead; perhaps YouTube saw reason, or the record label did.

Fred von Lohmann said...

Or perhaps it was a Content ID block, and the poster availed him/herself of the dispute mechanism. (I don't know, just speculating.)

Rebecca Tushnet said...

Good point, Fred. I've updated the post to point to the original post that said it was blocked and to offer one theory about what might have happened, though I too can only speculate.