Hey guys,

I want to do a video series on tesuji, mainly for myself but at the same time also for other people.
Howhever because I'm not a pro and I don't want to make mistakes in diagrams and examples I want to base my videos upon some books and work by other people.

For example dictionary of basic tesuji, some clasic tsumego books etc.

On what is the copyright? Will I be doing something illegal?

Cheers,
Otenki

Fortunate for you go is an ancient game and there are ancient go manuals which are not protected by copyright.
http://senseis.xmp.net/?ClassicalGoProblemBooks

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

For your Japanese sources:

1st) You probably don't have to worry regardless.

2nd) If you use diagrams / examples attribute it - regardless of copyright.

3rd) There is something like fair use / educational purpose especially for your project. This doesn't work for e.g. Sensei's Library as it claims copyright to everything published on it under Open Content License, but should be fine for educational videos.

4th) Even the copyright enthusiasts never argue against sharing game records on L19 although afaik professional organisations claim copyright on those. Examples from actual games are a good idea not only for copyright purposes.

To be a bit more specific than tchan001, I'd recommend the gokyo shumyo (the gengen gokyo is also nice, but most of the problems in there are pretty tough, while the gokyo shumyo also has some very easy and a lot of intermediate-ish problems).

It's thematically divided and has problems ranging from easy (double digit kyu) to fairly insane (high dan).

Since you're going to make a video on it I suspect you'll restrict yourself to tsumegos you can read out completely, so there should be no copyright issues whats-o-ever.