How can you use copyrighted material in your videos?

I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. I cannot advise you on what’s legally acceptable since copyright law is complicated and varies greatly depending on where you live. I recommend doing your own research and consulting a professional if possible if you are unsure if what you are doing falls with the boundaries of legal use.

To understand how you can use copyrighted material legally without needing to license it, you’ll want to research “Fair Use” laws in the United States, or your countries’ equivalent.

The best place to start is YouTube's own page about Fair Use. I recommend any video essayist or YouTuber who wants to use copyrighted material in their videos read through this and educate themselves, at a minimum.

But obeying your country’s copyright laws is not your only concern.

While YouTube’s copyright claim system is informed by the legal boundaries of copyright, it’s different from the actual legal copyright system and runs in part through a system of automatic detection that doesn’t take fair use into account. Copyright owners will sometimes claim a video and demonetize or block it even if the video is technically fair use. In these cases, you have two options- re-edit and re-upload the video to remove the claimed portion of the video or dispute the claim. And just because a video doesn’t get a copyright claim on YouTube- that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re legally within the bounds of fair use. The system is imperfect- so don’t assume that just because a video wasn’t claimed, your use of the material would be considered Fair Use in court.

My primary advice is to avoid using long (over 30 seconds), unedited sections of any film or TV show, and to always upload a video essay unlisted a few days before you publish it publicly. That way you have a chance to resolve any copyright claims before the video is live.