Using material you did not shoot

The category

At some point your edit needs something you do not have: a news clip, a photograph, a film extract, a screen recording of a website, a map, a piece of music, a frame from somebody's Instagram.

Every one of those is someone's work. This lesson is about handling that responsibly, and about being honest that the law here is genuinely unsettled in ways that matter.

Four routes, in order of safety

1. Licensed. You paid, or accepted terms, and you have a record. Stock libraries, archive houses, music libraries. The safest and the one that costs money.

2. Openly licensed. Creative Commons, public domain, government open licences. Free, and with conditions that are real obligations: CC-BY requires attribution in a specified form, CC-BY-SA requires your work to carry the same licence, CC-BY-NC forbids commercial use — and a monetised video, a client deliverable or an advertisement for your own services is commercial.

3. Permission. You asked the person and they said yes, in writing, with the scope stated. For material from individuals — a family photograph, somebody's phone video of an event — this is usually the right route and it is usually granted.

4. An exception in law. Fair dealing, fair use, or the equivalent in your country. This is the complicated one.

Where the law is genuinely unsettled

Copyright exceptions differ fundamentally by country, and this is not a detail.

The United States has fair use: an open-ended four-factor test — purpose and character including whether the use is transformative, the nature of the work, the amount used, and the effect on the market. It is flexible and it is also unpredictable, because it is decided case by case, after the fact, by a court.

The United Kingdom, India and many Commonwealth countries have fair dealing, which works differently: it applies only to an enumerated list of purposes. In the UK these include criticism, review, quotation, news reporting, parody and pastiche. India's Section 52 of the Copyright Act has its own list, which includes private use, criticism or review, and reporting current events. If your use is not on the list, the flexibility of the American test is not available to you, however transformative it is.

Elsewhere the picture varies again, and the internet does not respect borders — a video made in one country is watched in all of them.

What this means practically: there is no single answer to "how many seconds can I use". The commonly repeated figures — ten seconds, thirty seconds, seven notes of a song — are folklore with no basis in any statute. This is not a subject where a course can give you a rule, and nothing here is legal advice. Where the material matters and the stakes are real, that is a question for a lawyer in your jurisdiction.

What a course can honestly give you is the shape of the risk and the habits that reduce it.

Habits that reduce the risk

• Use as little as the point requires. If you are reviewing a film, use the shot you are discussing, not the scene.
• Make your use do work. Commentary, criticism and analysis around the material is what most exceptions are built to protect. Material used as wallpaper is the weakest position in every system.
• Do not substitute for the original. If someone could watch your video instead of the original work, you are in the worst part of every test.
• Attribute, always. Attribution is not a licence and does not make an infringing use lawful — but its absence makes everything worse, and open licences frequently require it as a condition.
• Keep a log. Same file as the music licence log: source, URL, licence or permission, date, what you paid, who granted it. The log is the difference between a claim you can answer in five minutes and one you cannot.

Content ID and platform enforcement, separately

Worth separating from the law entirely, because it operates independently of it.

YouTube's Content ID matches uploaded audio and video against a rights-holder database and raises claims automatically. A claim is not a finding of infringement and a dispute is not a court case. Material you are using entirely lawfully under an exception can be claimed, and material you have licensed can be claimed by the library that licensed it to you. This is an automated matching system, not an adjudication.

The practical consequence is the same as for music: keep records, and expect to use them.

Screen recordings and interfaces

A screen recording of a website or an app contains somebody's copyrighted design, possibly their trademarks, and sometimes other people's content inside it. For tutorials and reviews this is routine and generally uncontroversial. Two things to watch: do not capture other people's personal data in the frame — real names, email addresses, account numbers in a browser tab — and check the terms of service of anything you are recording, because some explicitly restrict it.

Photographs of people

A separate right from copyright. The photographer owns the image; the person in it may have rights over its use for commercial purposes, varying by country. In India the right to privacy and personality rights have been recognised in case law; in much of Europe, image rights are explicit. Using a stranger's face to advertise something is the case that goes wrong most often.

AI-generated material

Whether the output of a generative model is copyrightable, whether training on copyrighted work was lawful, and who bears the risk if an output resembles a specific work — all three are actively disputed and are being decided differently in different countries right now. Treat generated material as carrying unresolved risk rather than as safely free, check what your tool's terms actually grant you, and label it where it is a meaningful part of the work.

Today

Open your last project and write the log you should have kept: every image, clip and track that you did not create, with its source and licence. The ones you cannot account for are the ones to replace.