Here’s a thing a lot of creators get wrong: they think that as long as they’re teaching a skill — showing how to sew a costume, draw a character, build a prop — they’re in the clear. Like, you’re not profiting from the character itself, right? You’re just sharing knowledge. Surely that’s fine.
Not necessarily.
Copyright protects the original work — the character, the design, the costume details — regardless of what you’re doing with it. Teaching someone how to recreate something copyrighted doesn’t automatically make your content transformative or protected. The key question in fair use analysis is whether your use is genuinely “transformative” — meaning you’re placing the work in a new context, interpreting it, or using it for something meaningfully different than what the original creator made it for. A step-by-step recreation tutorial? That’s a hard case to make.
So what can actually happen? The copyright holder — or more often, an automated system working on their behalf — can file a DMCA takedown notice against your video. YouTube and most social platforms are legally required to respond to those notices. Your video can be removed, your channel can get a strike, and if you collect enough strikes, you can lose your channel entirely. None of that cares whether you were selling something or just teaching.
The “I’m just teaching” defense feels logical, but copyright law doesn’t have a clean carve-out for tutorials. Fair use — the legal concept that allows some use of copyrighted material without permission — depends on a few factors together, not just one. Whether you’re making money is one factor. But it’s not the only one, and it doesn’t automatically win the argument.
What actually helps? Creating original characters or designs. Using works that are in the public domain. Getting explicit permission from the copyright holder. Or making tutorials where you teach the general skill — the sewing technique, the sculpting method, the painting style — without specifically recreating a protected character or product as the finished result.
Bottom line: if you love making tutorials, that’s genuinely great — the world needs more creators who share what they know. Just know that the subject matter of your tutorial matters as much as the format. Teaching “how I sew” and teaching “how to sew this specific Disney character’s exact outfit” are not the same thing in copyright terms, even if they feel similar to you.