Since YT sucks with the whole copyright thing, can someone point me stuff that is copyright-free and can be used freely without fear?
Just search Google for stuff in the Public Domain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain) license. You can use any of that without any fear of anything.
There is some stuff with other licenses (creative commons, etc) that you can probably use so long as you're not making a profit, too.
Anywho, Youtube is so pissy about copyright because the copyright holders whine at them instead of the people that upload copyrighted material. I don't really blame them for being so draconic about it.