Pecking into Popular Culture

Fair Use

Fair use is, according to Dr. Strangelove, the “creative reworking of someone else’s material.” He states that a good way to judge if something is fair use or not is to check if it changes the audience or if significant value is being added. Fair use allows individuals to use corporate images, audio, etc, in their own creative ways and upload them to sites like You Tube without getting in trouble.

However, there are not actual people sorting through the You Tube videos deciding what is fair use and what is not. You Tube has computer algorisms which look through the site’s content and remove ‘corporate’ content, mostly according to audio. These algorisms remove many videos that are fair use of corporate material. You can file a counter claim to have your video put back up but most people don’t know that fair use exists and if they do, they don’t know how to use it.

Dr. Strangelove said, “advertisement supported media is legitimate, whereas amateur appropriated media is illegitimate.” ‘They’ want to remove as much amateur media as they can because the more time we spend watching sites like You Tube, the less time we are spending watching corporate material such as television and movies, therefore, we are seeing less advertisements.

fair use of Barbie logo