Everyone's a Critic: Copyright Considerations for YouTube and Twitch Reaction Videos (Part I)

A few months ago, my colleague Jay Kerr-Wilson published this blog post on the intellectual property issues surrounding the phenomenon of “Let’s Play” videos, a genre of online videos where an individual records and broadcasts themselves playing a video game. The individual might film themselves or just provide audio commentary, but in either scenario their own content is layered on top of the game that they are playing. The blog post discusses how this video genre could be considered copyright infringement with respect to the video game being played, as well as why generally we are not seeing infringement cases in this area because of the symbiotic relationship between content creators and video game publishers. As an avid consumer of YouTube and Twitch content myself, I enjoy a variety of different video genres—Let’s Play videos included. In fact, there is one particular video genre that I find myself consistently exploring: “reaction” videos. In Part I of this blog post, I’ll discuss about what reaction videos are, why they’re relevant with respect to copyright infringement, and how an exception under the Copyright Act might apply to them. In Part II of this blog post, I’ll explore the Copyright Act exception at…
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