YouTube claims that it has technology to automatically detect and prevent copyright infringement in user-submitted videos, but many people doubt that this software will be able to distinguish between actual infringements and fair use, since this is the kind of thing that usually requires thoughtful, informed human judgement.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has produced a "test suite" of videos that make extensive fair use of copyrighted stills, music and clips — the videos in the suite are legal, but they represent the kind of material that is in danger of being censored by automated takedown software.
The idea is that anyone who claims to have developed good copyright enforcement software should be able to run it against these videos and detect that they are not in violation of copyright law. If it can't, then it's not ready for primetime.
It doesn't hurt that these are, to a one, awesome videos.
(Thanks, Madeline!)
