I write a blog where I sometimes post my own movie reviews, so this post covering Red Letter Media’s great reviews of the Star War’s prequels and copyright infringement seemed particularly important to me. The reviews are very long and incorporate a lot of clips from the film in order to criticize them. The writer/creator of the reviews said that he might not be producing anymore reviews out of fear of being sued my Lucasfilm.
Techdirt makes the point that his reviews are transformative and fair use and that if the reviewer were to be sued a fair use verdict in his favor would set a precedent for what people are legally allowed to do in their criticism of other’s copyrighted works. Hopefully, these reviews don’t get taken down because they are indeed a creative work on their own. I think expanding fair use would not only benefit everyone’s free speech rights, but also enrich our cultural dialogue as well.
I almost always read movie reviews before I head to the movie theaters, because the tickets are expensive and the two hours that I would spend sitting is valuable! I also have a personal blog that I like to write posts about restaurant, club, and movie reviews.
For these kinds of reasons, I would hate to see good thorough movie reviews getting taken down because of the fear of being sued.
As you mentioned, I also think that copyright laws should exist to benefit the freedom of speech by protecting creative ideas of the people, and not prohibit them by claiming every use of short clips and descriptions as copyright infringement.