Are AMVs legal?

[Senrova]

AMV stand for Anime Music Video (I always thought it was Animated Music Video). They're basically music videos that put together clips from a movie or tv series. They often use music owned and copyrighted by an artist. Surely they can't be legal?

What do you guys think?

[Bloo.]

A lot of the time the owner of the video will credit the anime artists and the song owner in the description box or at the end of the video. That and as long as the music isn't being used for profit, YouTube will, in most cases, allow it to stay up.

It'd kinda be the same for like, a Relay for Life event. They play music and stuff owned by popular artists but no one steps in and says "Hey...thas illegal you're gonna have to turn that off."

I think as long as credit is given though, it's considered 'ok'.

[Aclediptus]

Yee, I think as long as credit is given where it's due. It should be tolerable by law, at least, YouTube regulations. Although it does seem a little like stealing, I guess as long as you do not claim that music as your own work you should be fine.

[WolfQueen]

They're legal under the fair use policy, except if you use all of the song without modifying. This is why some AMV creators only use a portion of the song or combine parts of a song into one. If you use a full song in your AMV (sometimes even when you modified the audio) and post it onto Youtube and such, you might have to deal with copyright strikes, ads being injected into your video, or even getting your video taken down. This is only a risk though, because Youtube (in particular) is a huge pushover. You might not run into these problems at all, but they have happened before, especially with strict music labels like Warner MG, and other labels signed into it.

If you use something like a nightcore song or a remix, however, then I don't think you will run into problems with copyright. But I think it's safe enough to use a regular song and make sure to give credit. Be aware of the risks though.

[Senrova]

I've heard of fair use. I know Warner Bros. allow it. I agree with all of you. Some companies don't allow it but otherwise, I guess they're acceptable. There's thousands of them on YouTube anyway so...

[Morgra]

I found a helpful blog post: Are Anime Music Videos Fair Use?
From what I got out of it, it's fair use as long as it isn't for commercial use. Most if not all AMVs that I've seen aren't looking to make profit off the videos so I think in their cases it's fine to use the content.

Because the video track of AMVs is non-commercial, highly transformative, uses only a small portion of the original, and has no negative impact on the market for the original, there is a very strong case that the video portion of AMVs constitutes fair use.