YouTube: An Insider's Guide to Climbing the Charts

Fair Use and Parody

Fair use is part of U.S. copyright law that allows small portions of copyrighted material to be used without permission, like quoting a couple of paragraphs of a book in a book review. Fair use is an expansion upon the original spirit of the copyright passage in the Constitution, providing a way to help "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." Most works of intellectual property borrow, in some way, from previous works, at least in spirit. That is the nature of progress. Modern content creators always borrow from previous work in some way. For instance, an original blues song can be copyrighted, but the person alive today writing a blues song did not invent the blues. Someone copyrighting a poem written in iambic pentameter did not invent iambic pentameter. Someone making a mockumentary (a mock documentary, such as the movie Spinal Tap) did not invent the form of mockumentary.

This comes from the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. § 107:

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 include:

1. the purpose and ...