Here’s one for the YouTube contributors out there.  Before breaking out your video/sound editing tools and going to work on someone else’s copyrighted material, here’s something you might want to read. It’s essentially a guide that’ll help you navigate the murky waters of “fair use,” the legal concept that allows the use of copyrighted materials without permission.

It’s being distributed by American University’s Center for Social Media, but was put together by a consortium of lawyers and university professors.

The first of their kind, these best practices will allow users to make remixes, mashups, and other common online genres with the knowledge that they are staying within copyright law. The code identifies, among other things, six kinds of unlicensed uses of copyrighted material that may be considered fair, under certain limitations. They are:

• Commenting or critiquing of copyrighted material
• Use for illustration or example
• Incidental or accidental capture of copyrighted material
• Memorializing or rescuing of an experience or event
• Use to launch a discussion
• Recombining to make a new work, such as a mashup or a remix, whose elements depend on relationships between existing works