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Comment by michaelq | Hacker News Reader

I built an app at the Launch hackathon last weekend that uses sound clips from movies. I'm concerned about fair use and the chilling effect that movie studios could have on using even tiny components of movies (sub 5-second audio clips, or, in this case, stills). Has anyone dealt with these kind of takedown requests first hand? Any war stories to share?

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No war stories here, just my two cents. It is unfortunate that the cost of defending against spurious suits can be substantial—even if the law is ultimately on your side. Basically, the movie studios are much better equipped to send out takedown notices than you are to respond to them. And as this article makes clear, movie studios may take action against many entities—even those that probably increase movie sales. After all, the twitter feed probably spurs interest in Top Gun (and the publicity around the takedown notice amplifies this effect even further). So tread carefully, and good luck!

You can have your whole server nuked just for having the name of a movie in a text file. It's the luck of the draw as to what your host does, and who decides to send a ridiculous DMCA request to them.

Never had to deal with takedowns personally.

I do personally know of a company that's paying for rights to use very short sound clips from movies though (from a very small library at that) - so it probably is on the studios' radar.

What is the context of the clips? It could be considered fair use. Your situation sounds different from this one, unless you are putting all of the 5 second audio lips in consecutive order...

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