• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, February 12, 2008

With all the recent talk of stopping piracy via filters that would automatically block copyrighted content, it's sometimes lost that entertainment companies themselves don't always object to users posting portions of their clips.

Sandra Aistars, Time Warner's assistant general counsel for intellectual property, made that point this morning, at a Gotham Media Ventures conference about digital rights management in New York City.

For instance, she said, the company has no objections to the clip, "'Lord of the Rings' was too long," a parody spot created by fans that uses footage from the movie, and is available on YouTube and other video-sharing sites.

If that clip constitutes a fair use of copyrighted material is subject to debate, but Aistars said the company isn't seeking to remove it regardless of whether it has legal grounds to do so. "We're not running around asserting our legal rights every time someone's doing something that's not a fair use," Aistars told the audience. "We realize these are fans," she said of the creators.

Of course, the problem for creators and companies like YouTube, is that they don't know in advance which clips the media companies will approve of and which they will claim constitute copyright violations. Currently, it's left to people to gamble that the studio won't take them to court, where they can be fined up to $150,000 per violation.

Video-sharing sites like YouTube have at least some protection in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's safe harbor provisions, which appear to require copyright owners to serve them with a takedown notice before commencing litigation, but that's still subject to interpretation.

Meantime, if media companies like Time Warner are getting a benefit out of fan-created videos, automatic copyright filters or other enforcement actions aren't the way to further fan creativity.