LAW AND ETHICS OF DIGITAL MEDIA HYPOTHETICAL: COPYRIGHT - Essay Example

Why or why not? Sony/BMG, the copyright holder of Puente’s music, has filed a suit against both Rita Espinoza and YouTube for copyright infringement. Rita argues that her inclusion of copyrighted music is not copyright infringement because it is a fair use of the material. Fair use is an exception to copyright and its one of the defenses available to Rita. Before we analyze the situation let us look at the following elements that must be in place in order for the infringement to occur. They include; a valid copyright, access to the copyright work by the accused, and similarity in the duplication of copyrighted work.

In this case, Rita agrees to have accessed the copyrighted work that she was able to include a 30 second clip of a 6 minute song from Tito Puente’s music. But she argues that her inclusion meets a copyright exception of fair use and that her intentions were not unlawful. Fair use allows an unauthorized party to make use of another’s copyrighted work for certain purposes in certain situations. The Doctrine of fair use stipulates that the use of copyrighted work must be noncommercial, one has to copy a small part, one has to add a lot of new material to the work as opposed to just quoting to the original work and one’s conduct should leave unaffected any profits that the copyright owner can make.

Rita’s inclusion of the video can be termed as fair use because she only included a few seconds as opposed to including the original video. Rita’