[npizzolato]

> Apparently, the father-to-be realised his film was streaming publicly on social media about 30 minutes into recording, but decided to leave it that way.

It would be one thing if he never realized he was broadcasting publicly. Once you realize something is public and decide to leave it up, I think you lose any moral authority to claim others shouldn't have any fair use claim to your public work.

[anigbrowl]

I disagree. Here's a moral (not legal) argument: he was streaming something for free to share with friends and family, and decided that he was OK to share it with interested parties that were interested to witness a live birth.

ABC is a corporate entity that exploited the footage for purely commercial purposes, as a way to attract attention to their news broadcast so they could sell advertising in the middle. This is a fundamentally different purpose from sharing it freely, and seeks to privatize what was previously given away unselfishly.

I'm not going to spend time looking up individual cases now, but I can think of several examples of big media companies suing over equivalently short excerpts of their broadcast product were used by someone else, eg that time Fox demanded the producers of a documentary fork over some $$$ because one of the interviews took place in a room where a TV was displaying an episode of The simpsons in the background of the shot.

So the moral argument rests on the vast disparity in wealth between the two entities. An individual human of modest wealth shared something freely in a spirit of generosity, and a aggregate entity of vast wealth exploited it for its commercial value but selfishly kept all the benefit to itself, callously ignoring the financial burden to the parents that typically entails upon childbirth. A firm run on more moral principles would have split the proceeds of the commercial activity with the creators.

[ScottBurson]

I think there are two issues here which we should separate. Yes, in an adversarial court system such as the one we have in the US, a severe resource imbalance between litigants tends to influence the outcome more than it should. Justice should be based on the facts of the case, not on the litigants' ability to work the system.

But as far as fair use specifically is concerned, I think fair use rights need to be protected and even expanded. I agree that Fox should not have been able to prevail in the example you mentioned. I don't agree that ABC's short clip of the video on question should not qualify as fair use.

But I suppose you could make the argument that imposing a narrow view of fair use on some large corporations could persuade them to lobby for broader protections. As things stand, I expect any lobbying going on about fair use is entirely on the side of restricting it.

[icebraining]

Large media companies are not very ethical; news at 11. How is that relevant to whether he should have a claim on it?