Ever wanted to use a film or music clip in a video to post online?  How do you tell if your use falls under Fair Use or piracy?  As a social media grows in popularity, more and more people  struggle to understand their rights to create videos or podcasts  utilizing clips and soundbytes from other sources.  Fair Use is a  purposely vague exception in copyright law whereby content creators  can use other people’s copyrighted material without licensing it or  paying for it.  In fact, permission is not even necessary from the original artist in cases of Fair Use.

Many artists, from visual artists to musicians and filmmakers have pushed the envelope on the doctrine and it is not always clear how  the courts will rule from case to case.  Today a wider demographic,  from bloggers to kids creating skate videos, has come under fire for  copyright infringement.

Kentucky based WebProNews spoke to Pat Aufderheide, the Executive Director for the Center of Social Media at American University, and Attorney Michael Donaldson of Donaldson & Callif. at South by Southwest and produced the following video which provides insight into Fair Use: