Fair use is not divided in a black-and-white fashion between commercial and non-commercial use.
This site has, among other things, this to say on the subject:
Collage is a time honored art form that utilizes pre-existing materials, including artwork and photographs. Often the materials will be copyrighted. So your unauthorized use of those materials would be copyright infringement unless your collage qualifies as fair use. Unfortunately, there is no legal rule on whether collage as a category would be fair use. It will depend in each case on an evaluation of the four fair use factors with respect to the particular collage.
For most collages, Factor (1), purpose and character of the use, will be the key factor. Typical collages, those that use many different materials juxtaposed in ways that create new visuals and meanings, will be considered transformative works. A work is “transformative” when the copyrighted material is “transformed in the creation of new information, new aesthetics, new insights and understanding.” In contrast, a work is not transformative if it merely uses the copyrighted material in the same way or with the same effect as the original work.
And this from the
Wiki article on fair use:
A key consideration in recent fair use cases is the extent to which the use is
transformative. In the 1994 decision
Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music Inc,
[7] the
U.S. Supreme Court held that when the purpose of the use is transformative, this makes the first factor more likely to favor fair use.
[8] Before the
Campbell decision, federal Judge Pierre Leval argued that transformativeness is central to the fair use analysis in his 1990 article,
Toward a Fair Use Standard.
[6] Blanch v. Koons is another example of a fair use case that focused on transformativeness. In 2006,
Jeff Koons used a photograph taken by commercial photographer
Andrea Blanch in a collage painting.
[9] He appropriated a central portion of an advertisement she had been commissioned to shoot for a magazine. Koons prevailed in part because his use was found transformative under the first fair use factor.
I used the clips to tell a story different from the original documentaries. The fact it was done to advertise a novel does not automatically disqualify it as fair use. The problem is that fair use is legally a very undefined concept. Personally I don't lose any sleep over it: the final video was short, used very short bits from the source materials, and advertised a novel that nobody has heard of in any case.
