Tag Archives: Infringement

Discussion Post 5

@Stansberry_DTCV

While only a federal court can deem whether a piece of work is considered “fair use” or not, under general guidelines the Youtube film “Star Wars Fan Film: The Essence of the Force” is undoubtedly a case of fair use. The video has merely taken the idea of Star Wars, implemented his own scenes and transformed it into a parody advertising the soda Mountain Dew. Even the words that scrolled in the beginning of the film that resembled those in the beginning of Star Wars movies were different. In my opinion, this is obviously transformative and could probably be considered a parody as well. The second video named “Star Wars Saga (The Best Trance Remix Montage)” is also transformative and under fair use because it’s clearly a compilation, paired with music to polish the remix. One argument that might be made against the video is that it isn’t considered to be a “limited amount” used for transformative purposes. I would argue this with the fact that the video is only slightly over 7 minutes long and there are plenty of examples that use the same idea. The video we watched in class about copyright using the Disney characters were a compilation of audio and video clips from Disney movies was used irony to simultaneously teach and show fair use, which is similar to what was done in the second video.