ChasNote

According to News.com, a Gawker Media staffer has been wrapping Gawker advertisers’ messages around video content owned by other copyright holders, such as CNN, ABC, Apple and Comedy Central, and posting the results to YouTube.

“Media lawyers say the postings by Belowtheradar [a Gawker Media staffer] could indeed run afoul of copyright laws. In some circumstances similar to this, lawyers have argued that postings such as this are protected under the ‘fair use’ doctrine. Under U.S. copyright law, a copyright owner authorizes others to reproduce the owner’s work.  Copyright material can be used without permission under the ‘fair use’ doctrine for purposes of ‘criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research,’ according to section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act.

  But fair use doesn’t apply here, said Russell Frackman, an entertainment attorney and partner at Los Angeles-based law firm Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp. Frackman was skeptical whether an advertiser could argue that they have a right to post material from TV shows under ‘fair use.’”

So this scheme to launch viral ad campaigns appears to have put the advertisers themselves in danger of legal action. Ooops.

From Ask A Ninja’s blog:

“Right now if you link to anything at a site like “http://revver . com” (remove the spaces) Myspace will delete the link. Try it. That sucks right?

“Revver is not the only site. There are dozens of smaller video and photo sharing sites that they are doing this to.

“Why should you care?

“Ask A Ninja was created because we were in control of where we posted the videos. That’s a big deal because if we’re forced to put them on MySpace video then FOX could take the episodes and make money off of them without paying Douglas or me anything. Which isn’t fair and takes away the incentive to create cool shows for you to watch.”

Nice article by Spencer Ante on Federated Media (Business Week).

“The Sausalito (Calif.) startup is signing up hundreds of the best sites and selling their ad space to brand-name advertisers such as IBM, Absolut, and Hewlett-Packard. Federated Media doesn’t own the blogs, as do other blogging networks such as Gawker.com, but it keeps 40% of the ad revenue and gives the rest to the site’s owner. ‘It’s kind of like a music label, except we don’t control their intellectual property and tell them what to sing,’ says Battelle.“