In re Douglas McCullough YouTube Video [1]

On October 31, 2007, Doug Clark of the Greensboro News-Record [2] wrote a blog post [3] about a campaign speech made by Douglas McCullough, a North Carolina Court of Appeals judge, to a group of Republican supporters. During the speech, McCullough made statements implying that voting for a fellow Republican candiate, N.C. Supreme Court Justice Bob Edmunds, would help Republicans fair better in redistricting litigation that would come before the N.C. Supreme Court in the future. In the post, Clark originally linked to a video of the speech posted on McCullough's campaign website. When the video was removed from the campaign website, he provided a link to the video on YouTube.

Blogger and law professor Eugene Volokh noticed that Clark's YouTube link led to a notice [4] that the video had been removed due to a third-party copyright claim. Volokh surmised that McCullough or someone connected with him had filed a DMCA takedown claim to remove the video. Volokh commented on the potential fair use defense available to whomever actually posted the video:

This takedown strikes me as quite troublesome: The posting of the video seems very likely to be fair use, because it was for purposes of news reporting and political commentary, and because it was highly unlikely to at all affect the market for the video (since the market likely didn't exist). More broadly, the judge is hiding important information from the public, information that he shouldn't be trying to conceal even if copyright law allowed such concealment. If anyone has a copy of the video and can point me to it, or e-mail it to me, I'd love to see it, and post it if it strikes me as newsworthy.

The page with the takedown notice still exists [4], but the video has been re-posted [5] to YouTube and remains available at the new URL.