Some friends and I just made a YouTube channel; which will contain both parodies and our original material. We set it up to be monetized, meaning getting a small amount of money per x amount of views. Something crossed my mind: one of the videos is an abridged movie. Meaning copyrighted footage. If we were just to upload the actual movie and make money on it, we could get in some serious legal trouble. However, it is a parody; we re-edited the film to make it comedic and made it into something our own. On blip, there are things like this, as well as movie reviews, music parodies, etc., which people upload for profit. There are also sites like That Guy With The Glasses which are hosted from blip which make a profit. On YouTube there are people who do parodies and reviews and make money. Some which come to mind are Shane Dawson, Barely Political and The Angry Video Game Nerd. Am I worrying too much, or should I cancel the monetation account?
I'd be extremely careful when it comes to copyright material. You do not want to get sued - however, I'm not a YouTube subscriber, so I know very little it. You seem to know what you're taking about, but I believe you need have permission prior to using anything copyright. I'm not sure how you'll be able to go about doing that; I'm sure a simple bing search will help you find information to do so.
You're not likely to get in any real trouble. Take a look at this amazing video on copyright and fair use, put together by a college professor and his students, entirely out of copyrighted Walt Disney films: [youtube]CJn_jC4FNDo[/youtube] The issue of fair use is hazy, if you use a substantial portion of the original work, the copyright holder might get annoyed, but in practice, all that's likely going to happen is Youtube will take down the copyrighted material. For example, all of the hundreds of "hitler finds out" parodies were there for ages, then the film owners got annoyed and issued takedowns. But nothing happened to the people who did the parodies, other than their work being removed. And many simply made a mirror image of the original work (to fool the automated copyright filters) and put them back up again. Same with all the "farting preacher" videos.
Oh I spent so long this summer reading copyright laws. Basically, nobody is really going to mind that you used some copyright footage, but it's a possibility that the person can ask for it to be removed. You're not going to get sued or anything, but it's best to try not to take too much from other people's work.
