Are these Facebook ads fair use?

Thursday, February 5th, 2009

Biggs is the editor of TechCrunch Gadgets. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at john@techcrunch.com. → Learn More

If you’ve been running around the book of Faces lately, you’ll see these little advertisements for some sort of government check scam – pay $1.99 or something for a CD that tells you how to get nonexistent government grants. But my question is this: I’ve seen this guy, Jeff Donahue (www. jeffgetsgrants. com) use two little screen captures from Fox News (like this one with a handsome, young Bill O’Reilly, with fake hands pasted over top holding fake checks). Is this fair use? Since I can’t contact Jeff directly – no feedback link on his site, maybe you armchair lawyers can chew on this in comments.

From what I can tell this would probably break Facebook’s advertising terms of service as well. It’s not quite art and it’s not quite commerce. It’s a strange, strange mix of the two.

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