Fair Use Concerns

• the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;  
• the nature of the copyrighted work;  
• the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and  
• the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
   
  The first of these pertains to if a work is transformative as I mentioned before as well as the commercial value. The combination of these is what lets something like a review use copyrighted content for commercial purposes if said review video is monetized for example which is usually the main concern when invoking DMCA to begin with given you’re profiting off of someone else’s work.
   
  The third point is also what supports fair use in this case, using only a small portion of trailer clips compared to a wider amount of commentary in the video (the bulk of the review) makes it quite different than something like simply re-uploading a large portion of the movie itself without much else along with it.
   
  Finally the last point is mainly again relating to if the video is monetized or not such that the use of the copyrighted work actually somehow infringes in the large market the original had. Usually this is not the case as a small YouTube video is not going to really be taking much out of the original’s market purely due to using clips from it if at all. A review for example is just using the source to support an argument being made (treating it like a citation for their argument if anything), the trailer or movie clips often could be completely substituted with stick figure drawings and not change the impact of the review much or the profits of the original content at all showing how the fair usage of the source material is fairly irrelevant in this case.
   
  Now after that, how does this apply to the image that was removed? Considering the same four points we can see that the image in question was indeed:
   
• Transformative (By offering commentary on the overarching current event of “The End of Derpibooru” as well as the content creators/community members/etc involved)  
• Not for large commercial value (essentially nonprofit)  
• Likely not having a provably significant impact into the into the artist’s market purely by virtue of using the image there alone (As in people do not go to this meme image as a primary way to the original image, a decline in market due to the external commentary is irrelevant)  
• Only using a small portion of various individual pieces of artwork compared to the larger whole of the image (Any one person’s artwork only makes up a fraction of the image’s area and meaning, showing that it obviously has further meaning than to simply infringe on an artist’s copyright)
   
  By this logic I’d say that even if real world copyright law was being considered here, a DMCA takedown request against this meme image would likely be rejected under fair use. If this is the case with actual copyright law (which is known to be fairly stingy and restrictive), then why on earth are DNPs treated with such carelessness and lack of nuance? Consider again the example of a content creator using some of a movie’s source material in a review. Should Disney (or whoever) have the power to simply nuke all these videos from the internet under some overarching DMCA takedown policy? To me that sounds completely insane and I do not see why that is how it is treated here.
   
  DNPs you could say are to respect an artist’s artwork which I can say is fair in some cases. You must also consider however respecting artists’ ability to create artwork or content creation is truly dead.

I don’t buy the “prevent from using a message they don’t endorse” thing either as that’d completely eliminate any ability of fair use to commentate from the opposite side using content from people who disagree with them. As long as it’s clear this is not the artist’s original work but rather a deviation then there should be no cause for concern under something like dilution of their reputation if that was even a concern (most people will not think the artist endorses a message that is criticizing them).