Angelina Kim
From YouTube Channel ANGELINA
Angelina Kim’s movie commentary YouTube channel is called “Angelina.” She attended Northeastern University for her freshman year (2018-19) but then had to take a gap year due to her family’s financial difficulties. During her gap year, she worked for her parents and worked as a barista to slowly figure out what she wanted to do. She said that she is not the type of person who wants to work in an office setting but wants to explore. She decided to be a YouTuber. She did research on how to monetize her YouTube channel and tried multiple genres, finally deciding to do movie commentaries.
She had 10k subscribers in May 2021, but she had 100k subscribers as of May 31, 2022. She also does live streaming on Twitch. Angelina is funny and energetic in her videos, and she does commentaries on a wide range of movies including most recently the Harry Potter series.
Because Angelina uses copyrighted materials of others to create videos for her channel, she keeps the legal concept of fair use in mind while she is filming and editing to avoid copyright infringement. According to the U.S. Copyright Office:
“Fair use is a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances.… Additionally, ‘transformative’ uses are more likely to be considered fair. Transformative uses are those that add something new, with a further purpose or different character, and do not substitute for the original use of the work.”
See https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html. In Equals Three, LLC v. Jukin Media, Inc., a 2015 federal court case in California, the court noted that “adding jokes, narration, graphics, or editing [of the copyrighted works of others] weighed in favor of fair use.” Also, the amount of the copyrighted work used is an important factor when it comes to fair use – the less of the copyrighted work to be used to create new content, the more likely the use will be considered fair.
In her videos, you can see how Angelina works to meet these requirements. She adds “jokes, narration, graphics,” reactions, and comments to movies and television shows to create transformative works from the copyrighted works of others. She also uses a small portion of the movie or show rather than the entire movie or show to create her reaction videos. Angelina explained to us her process, and how she accounts for copyright law and YouTube’s policies when making videos.