In the connected world, where businesses pop up like dandelions and anyone with a computer can upload video, audio and text-based content to be shared across the web, it is of growing importance to understand the potential legal risks that online businesses face. From your article, my conclusion is try to abide by Fair Use, document publicly the policies by which I attempt to abide by Fair Use rules, contact and get permission from major labels being very clear with them what will be done. Federal law provides copyright protection in musical works, including any accompanying words.” Musical works include original compositions, original arrangements, new arrangements of the composition, lyrics, and sound recordings.
Try ploughing all your effort into choosing a unique and original topic , and creating the best possible content around it. If you do that, you'll get away with 5 opening seconds of a chimp farting through a kazoo as your theme music. If you decide to podcast your audio presentation containing the song in question to the World Wide Web, you have again touched on the part of copyright known as performing rights, and it's back to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC for the appropriate licenses.
For example, if a student creates a video to show himself reciting and analyzing a copyrighted poem for English class and chooses to use a copyrighted song in the background, he can share that video with his teacher and classmates as part of his academic activities because of fair use.
The Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) governs copyright law in Australia and extends to ‘musical works' and ‘sound recordings'. YouTube is very strict about Copyright and can take your video down or even suspend your account for copyright infringement. But if I wanted to do a cover version of this song, the video would be viewable in all countries on YouTube and I might be able to monetize the video and share the income with the copyright owner of the song.
It does not matter whether you are dealing with a video clip, text, Copyright free music for other users to download for free music, photos or computer icons, if you want to make sure your use is lawful, you need to have accessed that material legally. This is not true as not all internet postings are in the public domain, the music may still be copy righted.