At the Flow Conference this weekend, one of the sessions I attended discussed political videos on YouTube. An audience member raised the issue of fair use on YouTube, and I suggested that Google had little business interest in evaluating fair use claims after a DMCA copyright notice. I suggested that fair use under the DMCA would probably only happen after test cases were sponsored by academic or library hosting sites.

Now it appears support for DMCA fair-use rights comes from an unlikely quarter.

NewTeeVee has a story that describes how the McCain campaign has sent letters to YouTube, asking the service to evaluate the fair use of news material used in McCain-Palin advertisements. Apparently the service has taken down McCain ads after news organizations have sent YouTube DMCA notices because the ads poached materials from their broadcasts.

Obviously, I’d rather see the McCain campaign go down in flames and the DMCA repealed, but it’s interesting to see this organization stand up for fair use rights.