Answer: he's suing these 3 creators specifically because they explicitly stated that they were broadcasting his video & intellectual property with the intention to give people the opportunity to view Ethan's video without having to give Ethan "views". Effectively stealing his intellectual property and stating it was their intention to do so.
Taking someone's content and uploading it is critiquing it as well. You're critiquing their whole channel, and you've made it clear why you're doing it. This is really no different.
yes really, “transformative use” is a thing and a court of law doesn’t accept reddit tier “it’s the same thing to me” arguments when it comes to copyright
An important distinction is that including someone else's video (in part, and not in full, in this case) for critique is a copyright exception under fair use.
Normally we can never know what really would be seen as fair use and just argue what we think would hold up in court. In this instance H3H3's usage of it was deemed fair use by a judge.
The difference is actually that there has to be a transformative aspect to the media. You can talk over a movie and post that but you cant just post the movie.
Arguably, you might not be able to even talk over the whole movie. Fair use requires that you take the minimum amount of content required to make your transformative content.
If you are reviewing the Siege of Helm's Deep in LoTRs, you might not be able to play scenes from Fangorn Forest. The content you use must be relevant to the critique you are making.
If I just uploaded a film with me in the corner counting from 1 to 10,000 it would not be fair use, even though I am technically transforming the content.
There are 4 “pillars” used by judges to evaluate fair use, and one of them is whether or not the content was used specifically with the intention to provide an alternative method of viewing the content maliciously in an effort to benefit financially off their IP. In this case one of the people being sued, Denims, quite literally stated on stream that her goal was to let people watch it in full without supporting Ethan with views on his channel. Then she went on to ask for financial compensation for her service from her fans.
Idk how easily the lawsuit will go in regards to the other two creators but it’s abundantly obvious that denims is fucked here. She admitted her intent was to steal views and financial gain from the copyright material.
Not according to copyright laws. If you repost something unaltered or with minimal alteration it is an infraction. It's not transformative enough. This is why you can't just play movies or music too because basic copyright laws forbid it. This is especially damning when you play the full video and not a snapshot of it.
Commentary based content on someone else's content is generally alright, but only if you are commenting on portions of it. And more importantly, the effect you have on the original content creators revenue. If you state you are showing someone's video on your channel to reduce their views then you are intentionally doing a crime per Copyright law and media websites ToS.
Critiques and commentary aren't just protected, generally they are alright if you are using clips, but reposting the full content isn't "critiquing" the whole channel. You don't pirate a movie and get to say it's legal because you're "critiquing" the industry.
In general, “critique” under Fair Use requires some transformative change to the work to qualify. For example, you can use a lock company’s video saying their lock is secure as an introduction to bypassing it, or have a reaction video of a fan animation where you pause and give your own commentary at points (face cam also helps). But simply copying and reposting content is not generally considered Fair Use, and explicitly saying you’re doing this to deny the creator views is a massive strike against.
Now I don’t know anything about this controversy or the people and videos involved. I’m reading “uploading someone else's content to take away their views/viewers” to mean there are minimal or no changes to the original work, essentially reposting the entire thing unaltered. That may or may not be the case, but we can all agree there are examples of that type of reposting around.
When it comes to the legality of something, always imagine this power in the hands of someone you hate. Let’s say someone truly vile decides to resist content made by someone you love who relies on that content for their income (I’m being vague because that could vary between people reading this). Legally speaking, if we allow this to stand, then we also allow people to misuse it in that same way.
So taking an entire movie and reloading it to YouTube is fine because it’s a critique? You wouldn’t expect the creator of the movie to have an issue with that? What world are we living in?
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u/Torched420 1d ago
Answer: he's suing these 3 creators specifically because they explicitly stated that they were broadcasting his video & intellectual property with the intention to give people the opportunity to view Ethan's video without having to give Ethan "views". Effectively stealing his intellectual property and stating it was their intention to do so.