Question: IS IT LEGAL FOR LNTV TO USE SEGMENTS FROM VIDEOS, SONGS AND OTHER MATERIAL BY OTHER ARTISTS OR NEWS AGENCIES?

 

Yes. As an educational non-profit that creates, news, commentary, satire and educational material, Liberty News Group (our organization) qualifies for ALL of the various requirements for FAIR USE under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976.

 

YOU CAN READ A DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE ACT HERE. Excerpt below:

 

The fair use defense to copyright infringement was codified for the first time in section 107 of the 1976 Act. Fair use was not a novel proposition in 1976, however, as federal courts had been using a common law form of the doctrine since the 1840s (an English version of fair use appeared much earlier). The Act codified this common law doctrine with little modification. Under section 107, the fair use of a copyrighted work is not copyright infringement, even if such use technically violates section 106. While fair use explicitly applies to use of copyrighted work for criticism, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research purposes, the defense is not limited to these areas.

(Source: Wikipedia)

 

We have a pro bono entertainment attorney on staff, but to date have never had to use his services to defend any of our video work. In cases where an occasional video (such as Myth Perceptions) is aimed more at entertainment than at satirizing, we have used stock music and/or stock video and images that we purchased from royalty-free archives.