Tag Archives: Fair Use

Leo Laporte Doesn’t Understand Fair Use

Lecherous Leo Laporte had quite the Reddit AMA yesterday. The shutins and nazi mods were out in full force to downvote any criticism or opposition. Unfortunately for #Soup, unlike the chat room they can’t ban you there; they can only hope you don’t view the downvoted comments (you should).

Here’s one interesting tidbit (there will be more to come from this AMA which was a gold mine as we expected):

That's not how that works. That's not how any of this works!
That’s not how that works. That’s not how any of this works!

Old License

Seems reasonable.
Seems reasonable.

New License

We knew something smelled fishy.
We knew something smelled fishy.

Hilton A. Goring could not be reached for comment.
Hilton A. Goring could not be reached for comment.
Total Drama noticed this license change within weeks and we figured it was for this reason, but now that Leo has publicly confirmed, we felt it was time to school him in the US doctrine of Fair Use under the United States Copyright law. He may want to ask Denise Howell for more advice.

From the “What Is Fair Use?” page at Stanford University’s “Copyright & Fair Use” section:

What Is Fair Use?

Leo Laporte
Transformative.
In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and “transformative” purpose, such as to comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work. Such uses can be done without permission from the copyright owner. In other words, fair use is a defense against a claim of copyright infringement. If your use qualifies as a fair use, then it would not be considered an illegal infringement.

Commentary and Criticism

This is what he thinks of the chatters
We certainly criticize this guy.
If you are commenting upon or critiquing a copyrighted work — for instance, writing a book review — fair use principles allow you to reproduce some of the work to achieve your purposes.

Parody

Parody.
Parody.
A parody is a work that ridicules another, usually well-known work, by imitating it in a comic way. Judges understand that, by its nature, parody demands some taking from the original work being parodied. Unlike other forms of fair use, a fairly extensive use of the original work is permitted in a parody in order to “conjure up” the original.

Dear reader, we’ll leave it up to you to decide. Please join us in our live chat room to discuss this further, a place free of censorship, unlike the TWiT Live Chat Room or #Soup’s AMA. Feel free to say things like “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t get Leo to fit in an amusement park ride again.”

This story is a result of a tip sent in by a reader via the “Feedback & Tips” link on the right. Keep ’em coming!

Public Private Parts

Why oh why would anyone want a public hangout – private? This is odd, next we will have to have our privates out in public when doing our private business.

A take-down notice? Pretty serious for an innocuous speech he was trying to make public via a public Google hangout. This sure is a heck of a puzzle. What, by George, is he trying to hide? This was a completely (mostly) unedited and in context video, an anomaly for this site. Why would someone want to hide what they said under no duress? Quite a conundrum.

I said don't look
I said don’t look

Seems to me the public has a right to know why the  beloved Shannon Morse was removed from a program. Seems to me that Father Robert explained eloquently that there was a meeting of the top people at TWiT, probably Padre, Leo, Lisa, and Jeff_N to decide Shannon’s fate. They didn’t think she should be at the meeting which makes total sense; why include her when they had experts at the meeting.

“We sat down and realized we were misusing her.” Uh huh, sure. So they all sat on a couch somewhere and realized they were misusing her. What does that even mean? I reckon they were saving money by firing her and just having a Priest who works free host. A pattern of cost saving that goes back to firing a real editor and replacing him with whoever was around. They wanted her on a show that “specifically fits her talents and her passions.” I guess she is passionate about reviewing Asus keyboards. Great Job with that!

Padre explains why Shannon Morse is No Longer hosting Coding101

By the way, we learned in a previous post, when the eyeballs do a left eye roll a person is accessing his front brain creative lobe. The creative lobe used in lying and not memory recall.

This site is hosted in Europe, or somewhere crazy like that, and if our host makes us take down the video below, we will but we think we have a case why it should stay up. I guess we may as well mention Shannon’s Patreon again. Looks like it will be a success and should close out at a respectable per-show amount.

Now Padre has something to do this weekend. Get that keyboard out and start typing in Scandinavian.