US judge: reaction video on YouTube can fall under fair use
A US court has ruled that a reaction video on YouTube may use fragments of the original video, because that falls under fair use. What matters is that without the clips, viewers may not be able to understand the context of the response.
The ruling doesn’t mean all use of clips in other videos is allowed, but it does count as a win for fair use on YouTube. The New York court ruled that in the case of this case, the use of the fragments of the original was justified.
The case involved a video of Ethan and Hila Klein. They had made a reaction video in which they showed images uploaded by another YouTuber and gave their own reaction to it. Three minutes of footage came from the subject and the remaining eleven minutes from the presenters themselves. Subsequently, the subject of the video, YouTuber Bold Guy, hired a lawyer and took the two to court for copyright infringement.
Another great YouTuber, Philip DeFranco, wanted to help the two financially. He set up a GoFundMe page where, thanks to a lot of attention on Reddit, among other things, the donations poured in in no time. The counter stands at 170,000 dollars, much more than the two thought they would need. Donations come from major YouTube figures like PewDiePie and Markiplier, as well as video game developers Markus ‘Notch’ Persson and Garry Newman. In addition, nearly 6,000 other people have donated. The lawyers for the pair have therefore decided that the money will be put into a general fund that is only intended for such, presumably unjustified copyright cases on YouTube. In theory, every YouTube user can claim that.
It regularly happens on YouTube that videos are taken offline by copyright holders because the copyright holders are not happy with what the creator of the video has done with their content. This while these videos should often be protected by fair-use legislation. In the past, this problem has also been raised on a large scale with YouTube, in the form of the Where’s the fair use? campaign. YouTube head Susan Wojciki responded at the time and promised that YouTube will take steps to improve the situation, but things like this still happen.