the "fair use" exception to copyright law does allow the reproduction of very short excerpts from a musical work. However, this is allowed only under very narrow circumstances such as:
* In the context of a review of the song (music criticism). * News reporting about the song. * Academic scholarship about the song. * Parody (making fun of the song, another form of music criticism).
What all of these exceptions have in common is that they do not allow you to use the song to promote your own unrelated website and advance your own unrelated goals. They allow you to talk about the song, and educate people about it in an academic way. But they do not allow you to take advantage of the song for your own purposes, unless you review music or do music scholarship for a living.
To be clear, you cannot take a 30-second excerpt from a popular song and play it in the background to jazz up your personal or corporate website and call that "fair use." You can't use a five-second excerpt, either! There is no blanket exemption for samples of any length.
The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use: "quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author's observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported."
Keep in mind these are all guidelines and not rules. Fair use is not an automatic right - it is not up to the government to assert it directly nor the copyright holder to be automatically beholden to grant it - you have to defend that your use is fair use.
Re: Good to know
Keep in mind these are all guidelines and not rules. Fair use is not an automatic right - it is not up to the government to assert it directly nor the copyright holder to be automatically beholden to grant it - you have to defend that your use is fair use.