Safe Blog Posts and Video

• Jen Miller for Needsomeonetoblog.com


• 27 Jun 2012

Judging Safe Blog Posts

Okay – time for you to be the judge.  As a person who loves creative marketing, I have developed and commissioned several “extras” to be displayed on my website.  Sometimes I use artwork, music or videos to further the meaning of my safe blog posts.  Recently I had a video produced for my blog which educates on the nature of safe blog posts, but also uses copyrighted content from another source. Obviously this raised a question of whether this blog post could still be considered 100% original website content.

Video Using Images in Original Blog Posts

Video Using Actor in Original Blog Posts

The actual amount of copyrighted content (images) is extremely limited, totaling less than 1% of the original Lord of the Rings film trilogy, but I was still concerned as I am trying to explain or teach on this principle.  I certainly do not want to be a stumbling block for anyone else when it comes to original blog posts.  This post on safe blog posts has more on my opinions (didn’t want to overwhelm you on here!).

I did a bit of research as the content is video based, a format I am less familiar with, and still believe the video is usable on my blog under fair use.  The purpose of the video is to educate and promote discussion.  The original copyrighted work has been largely distributed, truncated, reviewed, and otherwise disseminated, and the amount used of the original work is very minimal.  You can refer to YouTube’s Fair Use guidelines to see if you agree and then, please join in the conversation by commenting on this post.

Let me know which of these videos you would feel is a safe blog post.  I wrote the actual text, so there is no need for concern there in regards to it being an original blog post.  The main question remains in the images used.  Also, how would you feel if I posted “hand-drawn” replica pictures in the video instead of the actual movie images?  Does that make a difference?

What do you think? Which video would you use? Would you consider this an original blog post?