Abridged Parodies and Fair Use

If it's alright with Xagersfield, I'd like to post, or at least link to, my two part series on Fair Use and abridged series, as those two videos say things far better than I can in one post.

If not, I'll transcribe it, if that's better.

Feel free to do whatever you wish... Except clubbing old ladies.

xagersfeld wrote:

Feel free to do whatever you wish... Except clubbing old ladies.

Damn. So much for my Tuesday nights.





The first video deals with the legal speak of fair use and how abridged parody series are affected by this.

The second deals mainly with practical matters, i.e., why production companies shouldn't care.

I'm confused... If the Fair Use Act is indeed being utilized properly by abridgers how is it then that YouTube can suspend a page for doing something legally? Don't they alienate their viewers by taking away shows they enjoy watching? If no money is being made where is the need pull down popular material that tends to promote the show it's parodying rather than disgracing it. In short why do we even have the FUA if it fails to protect people who have no means to create an original show of their own and just wants to express their creativity comedically through a product most of us already own (hopefully) and/or love so much we choose to mock it mercilessly like a weak loved one...

Where's the harm done?!

The simple answer is that no single abridger is going to go against the machine, so to speak. We simply don't have the resources, energy or the will to do so. I've only met one person in my life with enough strength of will to flip the bird at a corporation and stand up for his fan project, but unfortunately, he's not an abridger.

As it stands, Lani, Kaiser, et al. from TeamFourStar could take Toei to court, and they might have a chance at winning(I'm not a lawyer, so I'll leave the certainties out of the equation). But they're all just college-age kids, probably not very well off financially, and they're doing this as a hobby, not a serious line of work.

If you can find someone with enough will to go through with such an undertaking as suing the production companies to allow parodies under the FUA, then I'd suggest referring them to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Hopefully they can provide some resources, or at the very least lobby someone in power to do something about it.

Of course, at the end of the day these are merely flights of fancies of mine.

Actually, do you wanna hear a secret?

All these companies that ban abridged series never actually watch the videos themselves. They DO want to stop the original files from surfacing on YouTube, though, so they basically gave YouTube a bunch of raw footage and said "if your machine picks up anything with this video content in it, ban it"

YouTube has confirmed that when it comes to copyright infringement, they don't want to have to do it manually, because quite frankly, they can't expect to hire people who have watched every single part of every single show and be able to say "okay, this one's a parody... this one isn't..." etc. However, they did have to do something after being sued several times.

So they made a machine that, when prompted, can compare a video on YouTube to a video file that the original owner has supplied. If it finds a match, the video is taken down.

Here are the problems with this:

Parodies are getting taken down without being looked over.
On the other hand, let's say the original video is 800x600 in dimensions. What if I use a program to change that to 799x599? You will see a itty bitty tiny loss of quality (or will you see it?) and your video will not be taken off. Or maybe if I change one pixel in the bottom right hand corner, just one, to be purple or black or something. It won't be a match anymore.

So what happens is that people who don't defend themselves against false copyright infringement can get banned easier.

Now, obviously, what if someone did that to the original files in order to keep them on YouTube, y'know, REAL copyright infringement? Companies that care have hired people to search YouTube to find these videos, and these hired people CAN tell if it is a parody or not a parody. In any realistic sense, a company will WANT the abridged parodies to stay up, it is great advertisement for them!

Also, the more you edit your videos, the more likely that the robot will not say "omg copyright". This means lip flapping. Manipulating the mouths of your characters to your own advantage will not match the machine's raw files. Also, it is suggested not to use a very long clip of the original without changing it. Like basically, if I don't lip flap, it is probably a bad idea to just use a minute of Death Note as it is in the original, regardless of audio. Team Dattebayo got hit by that one, whether they realize it or not, by not doing lip flapping and keeping the video original.

I know all this after doing a LOT of research after the banning of my 4th episode for false claims of copyright infringement. I fought it, and after about a month or so, I got it back, only to now have another copyright claim against it because they matched up my first (and only) music reference with their raw file. Luckily, WMG (or whatever company it is that owns Billy Joel songs) told YouTube that rather than banning videos with their song, add an option to those videos to buy the song. So now my episode 4 plays fine but an ad pops up in the beginning saying "BUY THIS SONG YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO", basically.

Hope this helps other abridged series makers. ^.^

You mean Universal Music Group(UMG) rather than Warner Music Group(WMG). WMG has a bad tendency to mute the audio of an entire video for 5 seconds of their music.

As for the "machine" idea, I've heard rumors to that effect, but I've never had any confirmation myself.

If that is the case though, I do have one question. A friend of mine, ZeroKiro22, uploads the actual episodes of Zoids Zero to his account. She does basically the same thing that I and many other ZMV makers have had to do: disguise the name in the title and avoid putting the name in the tags. Her videos have been up for about a year now.

Shogakukan Productions, the people that own the license to the Zoids franchise, are very anal and protective of their brand, and I've been kicked off 4 times previously for copyright thanks to them.

So, why is it that my videos, which are edited much more that her's, manage to get taken down far more often if we employ the same tactics?

But this is the same for any anime. There are several fansubs of Naruto: Shippuden who have been up for far longer than I've had a Youtube account, yet Masako and Vegeta were taken down in due time.

EDIT: I guess I do have to point out that I've been using the series name in the title and tags here recently because ShoPro seems to have backed down.

Truthordeal wrote:

You mean Universal Music Group(UMG) rather than Warner Music Group(WMG). WMG has a bad tendency to mute the audio of an entire video for 5 seconds of their music.

As for the "machine" idea, I've heard rumors to that effect, but I've never had any confirmation myself.

If that is the case though, I do have one question. A friend of mine, ZeroKiro22, uploads the actual episodes of Zoids Zero to his account. She does basically the same thing that I and many other ZMV makers have had to do: disguise the name in the title and avoid putting the name in the tags. Her videos have been up for about a year now.

Shogakukan Productions, the people that own the license to the Zoids franchise, are very anal and protective of their brand, and I've been kicked off 4 times previously for copyright thanks to them.

So, why is it that my videos, which are edited much more that her's, manage to get taken down far more often if we employ the same tactics?

But this is the same for any anime. There are several fansubs of Naruto: Shippuden who have been up for far longer than I've had a Youtube account, yet Masako and Vegeta were taken down in due time.

EDIT: I guess I do have to point out that I've been using the series name in the title and tags here recently because ShoPro seems to have backed down.

You nailed it. The name in the title and tags is what does it. See it from their side of it. They have been given hundreds of hours of footage from all of these companies, and are receiving terabytes of footage from YouTubers every day. Their machines cannot possibly compete.

If the tags or the title match the name of the series in some way shape or form, there is a chance the machine will check it. I haven't figured out if a user has to flag a video in order to prompt a machine or if the machines check videos for tags at random. I am inclined to believe both.

Also, there are a couple of explanations for those situations you presented. First and foremost, were the raw files the same? The exact same? Never been converted to another format? Do the other people use a different file format than you? Because if they do, chances is that there are many pixels altered in every frame of their video, however few or minor, you can always see a quality change when you go through an average converter.

Also, just because you have edited more does not guarantee your video won't be matched. It just means it has a lesser chance of it. It all depends on the specifics of how YouTube's machine works, which I don't know. I doubt that they try matching up, let's say, a whole 20 minute episode of Death Note to my videos. They probably search for select clips of it in my series, along with all the other stuff I mentioned before. If I just happen to not use a camera shot that it checks me for, then there is no chance of me getting banned. See, if someone was posting the original, they are likely to post a full unedited version of an episode. Therefore all YouTube needs to match it up with is just a clip.