Doesn't Giphy also have rights-agreements with major movie studios - thus allowing their users to exchange clips of copyrighted content without fear of litigation (something about Giphy persuading litigious studios that allowing clips is basically free marketing)?
Sure as an individual, but a movie studio would absolutely go after a company that is in the business of indexing, hosting and serving clips from their movies.
I suspect this is why Giphy got that license. And I bet it comes with some terms like allowing studios to remove GIFs they don't like, etc..
> And I bet it comes with some terms like allowing studios to remove GIFs they don't like, etc..
Y'ever noticed how the "send a GIF" panels in apps (often using Giphy behind-the-scenes as whitelabel) often have the top few rows of "trending" (quotes intentional) GIFs are mostly taken from recent major Hollywood releases? Most of the time it's whatever the most recent Marvel MCU film was - or some other mass-market action film - so if not the MCU then it'll be from whatever Disney's latest Star Wars movie or TV show just-so-happens to be.
...so yeah, that's very likely paid product placement right there. Not only is it free advertising for Marvel, but it's advertising that people actually want to share with each other!
Of course, what gives Giphy its credibility with net-savvy users is that they let people upload and cut their own GIFs. If you instead imagine Giphy as just being a free, maybe even banner ad-free, repository of GIFs but was strictly read-only (maybe have a likes system?) and comprised of only rightsholder-approved GIFs (but imagine the selection was still substantial so 75%+ of the time you'd still be able to find the right reaction GIF for your situation: it's just it'd all be the same well-known actors playing the same roles in all the same kinds of films and TV shows; no user-generated-content or really any material that isn't owned by a Fortune 500 media company) - but would people still use it? I think they would - especially if the E2E user-experience quality is there... as opposed to most other kinds of sites that do tolerate their users committing acts of copyright violation, but plaster the site in the worst online ads of all (because most of their users are smart enough to be offended by homogenized and consolidated entertainment media then they're going to be smart enough to run adblock too).
Disney Co is now at the point where they can choose to give Giphy a sweet deal (e.g. a covenant not to sue or even an explicit copyright license, provided Giphy promotes pro-Disney GIFs) and use Giphy not necessarily for their own direct benefit (i.e. GIFs as advertising new films), but to choose to actively support, fund and promote Giphy to ensure Giphy stays the default place for GIF editing and exchange, but because Disney then effectively "owns" Giphy, they can shut-off and shut-out promotion for all other non-Disney franchises just to ensure Disney laps up people's mindshare and imaginations: soon, in a few decades, Disney will own the rights to all new original thoughts.
Fair use really depends on, well, the use. If you were to take a 5s clip from a movie and use it as a commercial for your product, you would almost certainly not be within fair use rights.
And also to prevent it from growing in such a way that it could threaten existing Meta properties. This is the typical behavior in monopolies these days, get big enough to simply buy out any potential competition. Seems like the UK has had enough.
Which is fine, they're an advertising company. At the moment that regulators say that it's okay for Facebook to exist and operate the way they do -- collecting and organizing data to use for ad targeting, you can't really be on a high-horse about them doing that.
They're not buying it for the tech, they're buying it for the user base so they can sell their data to advertisers.