FDA official demands removal of YouTube videos of himself criticizing vaccines

That's theoretically what "fair use" is supposed to cover.

Copyright is unwavering. The law says that the author/owner gets exclusive use of that content for a really fucking long time (something like life + a century, thank you Disney lobbyists). Full stop.

The courts recognize that that lack of nuance is unreasonable. Therefore, they have ruled that copyright law doesn't apply if the use is "fair," hence the phrase "fair use." There's no hard-and-fast way to know if something is fair use. You're basically betting that if you ever get sued, the court will be on your side. There are axioms that the court has given (for instance, if you are making money from your use, it's less likely to be fair) that help you guess if the ruling leans in your favor.

The reason for these exemptions is that it's in the public's interest for certain kinds of expression to transcend copyright, such as news and satire. (This is also where the folks belief that you can't get in trouble if it's a parody come from.)

"Clearance and Copyright," and "Free Culture" are both great books to learn more about this. The author of the latter, Larry Lessig, is the guy who fought Disney's copyright lobby in court. His experience inspired that book, and also inspired him to found the Creative Commons.

All of that is to say that there are carve outs to copyright where the public interest overrides the private content monopoly, and a public official speaking in an unflattering way certainly qualifies.

[update] apparently those axioms were actually codified into law in 1976, but they are still merely defensive - nudges for how the court might rule, not protections in their own right.

> Prasad, a former hematologist-oncologist at the University of California San Francisco, is now *head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), which makes him the chief vaccine regulator in the US.*

I never said the copyright claim is invalid. A court would need to decide on matters of fair use.

The article specifically said this regarding the content:

Creating the channel, Howard told Guardian in an interview, had been an attempt to “preserve” what these individuals had said during the early years of the pandemic, including comments that Howard said exaggerated the dangers of the Covid vaccine to children and – in some cases – minimized the risk of Covid infection, among other issues.

“These videos were nothing more than collections of what other doctors said during the pandemic, including doctors who are extremely influential and who are now the medical establishment,” he said.

Howard’s entire channel has now been deleted by YouTube, which cited copyright infringement.

Could you try to be like, even 10% less knee-jerk partisan?

It's an appointment in the FDA (which requires actual technical knowledge) and Prasad is a well-documented member of the political left, to the point where he was recently chased out of the FDA for being on the left.

That‘s not change but destruction

It's strange to me because it seemed like the dominating issues should have been recovering from the economic destruction wrought by covid monetary policy and dealing with the overt Russian threat.

Trump tried hard to be perceived as an outsider candidate when trying to return to office. Logically, that makes no sense, but I'm sure their research showed it was important.

This was a common argument in some of the poorest and most EU-dependent parts of the UK (these generally voted for Brexit). Well, they got change, alright.