In Part I of this blog post, I explained what a reaction video is, how it could constitute copyright infringement under the Copyright Act, and how the possible legal exception for “criticism” or “review” might apply to a reaction video. In Part II of this blog post, I further analyze this exception through both a Canadian and U.S. legal lens (no pun intended).

A few months ago, my colleague Jay Kerr-Wilson published this blog post on the intellectual property issues surrounding the phenomenon of “Let’s Play” videos, a genre of online videos where an individual records and broadcasts themselves playing a video game. The individual might film themselves or just provide audio commentary, but in either scenario their own content is layered on top of the game that they are playing. The blog post discusses how this video genre could be considered copyright infringement with respect to the video game being played, as well as why generally we are not seeing infringement cases in this area because of the symbiotic relationship between content creators and video game publishers.