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Playing Fair: Youtube, Nintendo, And The Lost Balance Of Online Fair Use, Natalie Marfo

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

Over the past decade, YouTube saw an upsurge in the popularity of “Let’s Play” videos. While positive for YouTube, this uptick was not without controversy. Let’s Play videos use unlicensed copyrighted materials, frustrating copyright holders. YouTube attempted to curb such usages by demonetizing and removing thousands of Let’s Play videos. Let’s Play creators struck back, arguing that the fair use doctrine protects their works. An increasing number of powerful companies, like Nintendo, began exploiting the ambiguity of the fair use doctrine against the genre; forcing potentially legal works to request permission and payment for Let’s Play videos, without a determination …