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Full-Text Articles in Law

Reclaiming Copyright From The Outside In: What The Downfall Hitler Meme Means For Transformative Works, Fair Use, And Parody, Aaron Schwabach May 2013

Reclaiming Copyright From The Outside In: What The Downfall Hitler Meme Means For Transformative Works, Fair Use, And Parody, Aaron Schwabach

Faculty Scholarship

¶Continuing advances in consumer information technology have made video editing, once difficult, into a relatively simple matter. The average consumer can easily create and edit videos, and post them online. Inevitably many of these posted videos incorporate existing copyrighted content, raising questions of infringement, derivative versus transformative use, fair use, and parody.¶ ¶This article looks at several such works, with its main focus on one category of examples: the Downfall Hitler meme. Downfall Hitler videos take as their starting point a particular sequence - Hitler's breakdown rant - from the 2004 German film Der Untergang [Downfall in the US]. The …


Judges As Bad Reviewers: Fair Use And Epistemological Humility, Rebecca Tushnet Jan 2013

Judges As Bad Reviewers: Fair Use And Epistemological Humility, Rebecca Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The future of fair use depends on whether judges act like bad reviewers, or whether they behave differently in interpreting challenged works than they do in almost every other aspect of judging. Ordinarily, judges are asked to produce definitive answers about the meanings of texts. But when it comes to literary judgments, the bad reviewer is the one who insists that a work has only one meaning, and announces the bottom line as if it were an absolute. A good reviewer explains the sources of her judgment, making room for other interpretations. This is also what is necessary to a …