Demon_of_Elru: Who owns the rights to this series? I am creating a youtube Lets play series with NWN2 and would like to monetize it. Would this be allowed under the fair use law? Would I have to contact WoTC?
Okay, let me preface this by saying I am not a lawyer and this is not a legal answer, it's just the practical reality of how things work based on my experience following these issues.
If you try to contact Wizards of the Coast, or any other rightsholder, it is exceedingly unlikely you will get a useful response. It literally costs them money in the form of employee time to respond to you, and the lawyers are particularly expensive. If you do go ahead anyways, there are three reasonably possible outcomes.
The most likely is outcome is that nothing happens, you get to monetize your Lets Play and no one actually cares (at least enough to do anything about it). Whether you qualify as fair use or not is rather irrelevant; there just isn't much benefit to the rightsholder to shut you down. The ad revenues that a single youtuber generates is small potatoes to a big multinational corporation, it doesn't hurt their bottom line, and it's not worth their time. The actual question of whether you qualify as fair use is rather irrelevant in this case, it's just that the economic calculus on the part of the rightsholder favors inaction.
The next possibility is that you get hit by content ID by the rightsholder. There is no meaningful appeal, fair use is not considered, and you probably will get nothing from the ads running on your video. If you want to get around this then your best option is to turn off ads entirely, use the copyright deadlock technique (Google it) to bug up content ID and prevent it from forcing ads on your video, then encourage your subscribers to support you on Patreon. You can also reach out to other youtubers for their experience and learn about which companies overuse content ID and avoid doing Lets Play videos of their games.
The final possibility is that you get hit by a DMCA takedown notice. This is very unlikely in your case; most of the litigious rightsholders prefer content ID these days, and as I've already said more than once most rightsholders simply aren't going to care. Still, it could happen. If this does happen then your video will get taken down and you have a limited window of time to respond. You have two options: you can let the takedown stand and walk away, or you can challenge it on fair use grounds (note: ensure you retain a lawyer
before responding to a DMCA takedown. There are big legal liabilities on the line). If you do challenge it, you then have to wait for their response. In all likelihood the rightsholder will elect not to sue you and your video goes live again, since the cost of taking you to court is prohibitive. However, there's still the specter that they could just issue another takedown notice. They're not
supposed to do this, but since legal repercussions for misuse of DMCA takedowns are so rare many rightsholders go with the machine gun approach to takedowns and you can get hit twice. In the unlikely event that they do sue you,
now is when you get to make your fair use defense. You'll need a lawyer, which unless you luck into pro-bono representation will cost you
a lot of money, and if you lose you will likely face a judgement in the hundreds of thousands of dollars so even if you've got a strong fair use claim this is not a fun position to be in. The good news, however, is that most rightsholders have no desire to pay the legal costs of bringing such a case to court and are even less thrilled by the potential bad publicity in being caught in a lawsuit like this. That's a much more practical defense than fair use since it means the "getting sued" outcome is exceptionally unlikely.
Don't be too afraid of that last possibilities. It's expensive, nasty, and potentially ruinous, but it's also incredibly unlikely. In almost all cases, either nothing happens or you get slapped by content ID. Fair use doesn't matter in either of those cases. There are certainly a lot of major issues outstanding with the way things work, but that's the practical reality right now.
