Code of Best Practices Response

This document was something I was really interested in reading as I went into it, copyright and fair use conversations are becoming more and more prevalent in our society, yet often the exact rules of what constitutes copyright infringement don’t always seem to be clear. Something I didn’t think about that was brought up in the document was about how nonprofessional video can be much more easily distributed nowadays, and as such there is more of a chance for these amateur videos to possibly have an affect on established businesses, making knowing these laws even more important. What I was surprised to read was that fair use does not necessarily have an explicit letter of law, but rather it is flexible and able to be changed to apply to different circumstances. I can definitely see how this is a good attribute, as art in particular is a very broad field, so applying one set law to regulate it would be very difficult. However, I also think it’s possible that this kind of system could lead to arbitrariness in rulings and judges coming to different conclusions. I have also seen many situations where companies have abused fair use, such as by claiming the revenue of YouTube videos that include small snippets of their content, but in that case,  I think it comes down to YouTube needing to do a better job at monitoring that activity. After reading the list of best practices, I feel confident that as long as I am not reproducing someone’s work with little to none of my own input or transformation, I would be protected by fair use laws.