From Rebecca Tushnet’s 43(B)log:
Hosseinzadeh v. Klein, No. 16-cv-03081 (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 23, 2017)
Hosseinzadeh posts original video content on YouTube, playing a character known as “Bold Guy.” Ethan and Hila Klein criticized “Bold Guy vs. Parkour Girl,” in which the Bold Guy flirts with a woman and chases her through various sequences, in a video titled “The Big, The BOLD, The Beautiful.” The accused video is almost fourteen minutes long, and intersperses long segments of commentary with short clips of the Bold Guy video, ultimately using three minutes and fifteen seconds of that five minute, twenty-four second long video. “As critical as it is, the Klein video is roughly equivalent to the kind of commentary and criticism of a creative work that might occur in a film studies class.” From that, you can fill in the rest of the fair analysis: Kleins win.
. . . .
Defamation: nothing in the lawsuit video was defamatory; it was either substantially true or opinion. E.g,, Ethan Klein’s statement “I think that the heart and soul of this is . . . he doesn’t like that we made fun of him, and so he’s suing us” was “a quintessential statement of pure opinion.”
Link to the rest at Rebecca Tushnet’s 43(B)log
PG has posted a couple of items relating to this lawsuit to help visitors to TPV understand the concept of fair use under copyright law.
While it hasn’t happened for a few years, in the early days of TPV, PG occasionally received an email to the effect that he had copied too much of an original post and was violating the author’s copyright.
One email said PG should simply provide a link to the OP. PG’s personal experience floating around the web has been that he virtually never clicks on a link without some reason to do so beyond the existence of the link. The days when PG was excited about a page full of links are long past. He suspects he may not be the only individual that behaves in this manner.
Speaking of those long past days, PG remembers when Yahoo had a daily list of links to new websites it had added to its website and it was possible to visit every new site within 15 minutes or so.
Doesn’t this all rather depend on what the person sueing is hoping to achieve.
Sure, they might not be able to win the legal case, if you work from the theory that all publicity is good publicity, and I believe that in the case of the Internet it is, then generating controversy is the best way to get the attention.
Kind of a reverse of the Streisand effect.
I started re-blogging for a client based on what I saw here. These are, generally, fairly short news stories, and I try to take no more than the first four or five lines. I always link back to the original post and give the author credit. I have emailed people asking for a photograph for such posts. If they don’t want it up there, they sure don’t have to give it to me.