I have a collection of video clips that I use in teaching, scholarship, and research.
According to the doctrine of Fair Use (17 USC 107), I may use portions of a copyrighted work without permission of the copyright holder for a variety of purposes, including research, scholarship, and teaching. This is assessed by considering four factors, listed below.
The purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
I use short clips from movies and TV shows to illustrate the implications of robotics and other areas of artificial intelligence research. These clips are used for nonprofit educational purposes such as my classroom teaching and my research presentations.
The nature of the copyrighted work, such as whether the work is fiction or non-fiction, published or unpublished;
The clips I use typically come from well-known mass-market movies and TV shows, which are published fiction.
The amount of the work used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole, such as using a poem in its entirety, or using one chapter from a long book;
The clips I use are almost always less than 5 minutes, with one or two up to 10-12 minutes, out of an approximately two-hour movie or one-hour television show. I believe that the average is less than three minutes.
The effect of the use upon the potential market for the copyrighted work.
I expect that some portion of my audience would be motivated to view or purchase the full movie from which I extracted the clip, so I expect that my use of the clip would increase the market for the work, though surely only slightly.
I assert my right to use the video clips I collect under Fair Use.
The Librarian of Congress recently (10-27-2015)
issued new rules
clarifying and improving the Fair Use provisions of the DMCA.
(The actual rules: EFF, Federal Register.)