Copyright Protection

Hey everyone, I have a question regarding copyright... Would you be able to go to YouTube, make a gif from a video and use it on your website legally?

Also, say you edit an image in photoshop, does this then make the image your own? For example, taking an image from Google images and changing colours, adding text etc...

Just trying to avoid any potential issues which may arise after putting in a lot of hard work into my site. Thanks in advance!

It depends... you are talking about "sampling" and "fair use". For example, it is "fair use" to use a photo of a book's cover in your book review post. It is copyright violation to steal another site's book cover photo to use in your book review even if the photo you would take would be practically identical. If you are "sampling" a comedian's joke and putting it on your site then it doesn't matter if it is only a few seconds of a much larger video... you stole a whole joke which is the product the comedian produces. If you just sampled the audience reaction to a joke for use in your review of the comedian then that would probably be fair use. If you give away value somebody paid to produce then you are probably going to get in trouble.

Editing someone else's content usually gets you into trouble if you get caught. You can't just record game of thrones in sepia tones and call it new art. You'll never get away with that. But you could make a collage of famous paintings and that would be new art. It is civil, that mean if someone doesn't like what you are doing they can sue you. If they can demonstrate that your actions caused damages then you could be in big trouble. In the 80s and 90s rap artists sampled other musicians work to make new art. In general the courts sided with the artists that they were creating new art that didn't adversely effect the original works, but there were a number of court battles and right or wrong, fair use or not, you could have to defend yourself in court.

Ok great, I think I am overthinking it for what I am planning to do. Thanks for the help!