Help Understanding YouTube and Copyright Laws?

[Sam]

Hey guys.

I have a website for urban fashion, music, technology etc and I am making YouTube videos of the most popular content of the week and would like to know more about the copyright rules regarding music.

On some other videos they are using music, which I presume is copyrighted, and have a link to the artist's website, to their twitter and a place for viewers to download and buy the song. I am not looking to use full songs, I am instead looking to give 15 second previews of newly released songs and albums to the viewers.

Our website collates all the latest and best fashion, music, technology, event news and gives it to the viewers in one place so one might suggest that by displaying these albums, mixtapes and singles to our viewers in video form on youtube along with displaying their website, twitter, facebook and link to buy the song, that we are helping to sell it on their behalf and therefore wouldn't want to flag us? Is this how it would go? It's not like I'm using it for background music, it's actually to display the music to our viewers and get them to buy. Is this allowed or not?

Lastly, mixtapes... are they copyrighted and can they be used without worry? Again, not whole songs but previews. In a video of the most popular 15 things from our site we're only looking to show short clips of songs but this is important because showing the album artwork is not good enough for the video but we can't afford to not include music completely.

Thanks for reading this, I know it's a long one but I'm really in need of help and I really appreciate all replies so thanks in advance!

Sam.

[bcnu]

You, like the person who uploaded the video or music, would absolutely need a license from the copyright owners in order to duplicate and distribute (i.e., upload) any copies of those copyrighted works, assuming you don't want to be sued.

in a FEW countries, under "fair dealing" laws, you can get away with publishing up to 30 seconds of some music in an effort to advertise sales of authorized copies. The USA is not one of those countries; there is no legal "minimum", and people have been successfully sued for violating less than 5 seconds of music.