Do video mashups necessarily mean copyright infringement?

Not necessarily, according to the American University's Centre for Social Media which has published a report called Recut, Reframe, Recycle (PDF).

This might be some small grain of hope for those of us planning user-generated video projects.

The study points to a wide variety of practices—satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and of course, pastiche or collage (remixes and mashups)—all of which could be legal in some circumstances.

The announcement post gives examples of mash-up videos which could arguably lie under the "fair use" harbour - satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and pastiche or collage.

These all refer to US interpretation of fair use, of course, but it's an interesting take.

This one, apparently, might come under the heading of "illustration or example":

Daily Telegraph mashup up A Level results and Google Maps

Thanks to the Online Journalism Blog for finding this Google Maps / A Level results mash-up.


It shows great diligence on the part of the DT (whose explanation can be found here) and gets "A for Effort" from me.

But actually I don't think that in this case it adds much to the story or the user experience other than being a bit of a gimmick. I suppose if you had a sudden desire to know the A Level performance of schools in Altrincham area, this would be one way of doing it.

But I think it's an unusual enough approach to get attention, so that's a good enough reason for doing it.

And hats off anyway to an old media publishing enterprise for not feeling it has to do everything itself when there are better tools around than it could build for itself.


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