This week, Gawker Media has demonstrated how to offer an exclusive online video clip: deem the clip newsworthy, invoke fair use when threatened with legal action, and publicly refuse to comply with a request for removal.
The video in question, which has been posted and removed from Google Video and YouTube in the past few days, features celebrity Tom Cruise expounding upon the reasons he believes in Scientology.
Gawker may be even more alone in their stance soon, as influential copyright reformer Lawrence Lessig leaves a decade of scholarship freeing culture to tackle corruption in Washington.
In other copyright news, yesterday the Library of Congress blog announced a pilot project with popular photo-sharing service Flickr, inviting the public to tag and comment on Library of Congress images from the early twentieth century in a new Flickr area called The Commons.
For the pilot, images in the Library of Congress' Flickr photostream like this fiery locomotive wheel being retired can be tagged and commented on by Flickr users to further identify the image.
Two other developments of note in this pilot: fuzzy timestamping (this image was "Taken some time in 1940") and a new usage statement ("No known copyright restrictions").
A green "O" symbol represents this new usage, and clicking the green symbol for more information takes the user to an explanatory Library of Congress page, completing the circle.
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Fair use doctrine
A brief overview of fair use:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall includeâ€â€
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