Fair use?

[Mass Distraction]

To what extent is copyrighted content actually available for fair use? I've seen videos and other projects getting taken down online when it sometimes is only for the smallest thing. I'll give you a couple of examples here from the last year, spanning from relatively obvious to absolutely ridiculous.

Some abridged series have been taken down on YouTube recently, which is kinda understandable since they are indeed using the original content on the video as the basis. One guy whose videos I follow managed to make a deal with YT where he is able to upload the episodes on his own channel IF he hosts them on his own website. He did that but I have no goddamn idea how that even works.

Fan games. Apparently it's dirty and wrong to make non-profit games from a copyrighted franchise, as the recent letters from Hasbro to makers of MLP games have proved. Even if the animations, programming, engine and basically the whole game has been created from scratch you still can't use characters and/or locations from a known franchise.

Fan animations. One of the more ridiculous examples to this is a Finnish guy who was making short parody animations, created with Paint and Movie maker, about the Moomin characters, even naming the whole thing "Tales from Hippovalley" and having ridiculous names on the characters. They all got taken down by the copyright owners, multiple times and from multiple accounts.

Now, this here is the rotten cherry to top it all off. Screwattack was unable to post new videos on YouTube for a while because one of their videos got flagged by CBS, the American TV network. The flagged video was an old news flash with a member, who hadn't even worked in the place in ages, making an impression of Horatio from CSI:Miami as an ending joke. Even joking is now apparently illegal. Fancy that.

Then there's the fact that you shouldn't even have a copyrighted song playing in the background on your video, even if it's coming from the radio etc. which in itself is total bullcrap.

I suppose I don't even have to remind anyone of the Megaupload fiasco.


Phew... Now that I got all of that off my mind, what is your opinion on all that?