>>109367419>>109367589Not really. Even if you include a picture of Mickey Mouse, it's not copyright infringement if it falls under fair use.
We're talking about US law here.
https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/Here is my layman's analysis (and no, this is not chat-gpt):
1. Purpose (transformative, non-profit, or educational)
His videos are critical of Cover and hololive and thus the first prong would heavily favor him as criticism is explicitly listed as one of the main factors in determining whether something is transformative.
2. Nature (factual vs. creative)
He isn't using their characters to make a derivative creative work. He is "reporting" on rumors involving their IP and talent. So this prong also heavily favors him.
3. Amount used (small vs. large/heart of the work)
He isn't uploading their performances or even using clips from their streams. If he used any material of theirs, at most it would have been screenshots from streams, arguably the absolute minimal amount required to show evidence of what he's talking about.
4. Market Effect (harm to potential sales)
Note that this is not the same as defamation. It doesn't examine whether sales are lowered because of reputational damage, only if sales were harmed due to an infringing reproduction.
In other words, this prong examines whether the alleged infringement replaces the original in the market. For example, it would be reasonable to assume uploading a handcam recording of a movie from a movie theater would lower sales of that movie since people could could just watch the pirated copy.
But that's not anything like what this guy did. He made "news" and rumor videos. This doesn't replace the market for the original IP or streams at all.
So all four prongs of the test would heavily favor him in US court.
But again, this doesn't really matter, because now that Cover has his personal info, they can simply sue him in Japan and they will easily win because Japan does not have fair use doctrine.
