“The city claims that the YouTube videos made from the copyrighted council footage do not fall under the fair use exception because they “have no critical bearing on the substance or style of the original composition.”
However, all three of the videos we looked at from this account directly critiqued or reported on what was being shown in the council footage. We’re not lawyers — and we certainly don’t know enough about Inglewood politics to comment on the accuracy of what’s alleged in the YouTube videos — but this sort of direct criticism is generally considered by news media to be fair use.
And we’re not alone in coming to this conclusion.
“When you are taking somebody else’s material, not just to reproduce it but to comment on it and criticize it and sometimes to parody it … that is generally fair use,” UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh tells the L.A. Times.”
There’s more at consumerist.com.