Creative Commons licensing just gave your YouTube videos a lot more freedom

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As of noon Eastern time today, you can put a Creative Commons license (CC BY 3.0) on your YouTube video uploads. In addition, YouTube will be uploading plenty of Creative Commons content to its editor tool to get you started.

Through the site's year-old video editor tool's new Creative Commons tab, you'll get more than 10,000 videos from sources like PublicResource.org, C-SPAN, and Al Jazeera to use in your projects. And of course, you can also post whatever you've created from scratch with the CC BY license.

At least for now, this liberal license, which allows for remixing and commercial reuse with only attribution, will be the only CC option on YouTube. The intention is to reduce confusion in an audience they expect to have low familiarity with Creative Commons, as well as to allow commercial reuse. They'll also be making it quite easy to credit and link to the original source.

This addition will be great for Creative Commons, which will now have the exposure to video that Flickr gave them for photography. And it'll be a bonus for YouTube and its users as well, opening a new world of possibilities in participatory culture.

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Ruth Suehle
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Ruth Suehle is the community leadership manager for Red Hat's Open Source and Standards team. She's co-author of Raspberry Pi Hacks (O'Reilly, December 2013) and a senior editor at GeekMom, a site for those who find their joy in both geekery and parenting.
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3 Comments

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Craig Harffey | June 3, 2011
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Great - looking forward to my inbox being filled with even more crap now last months crap can be legally remixed !

Seriously though - this is great news all round and may go some way in getting CC as well understood as copyright is among the general public.

As a consultant I often produce content that contractually belongs to the client, which I cannot reuse. I would love to be able to CC license some of the more generic (less valuable) content. To me this makes more sense than a client paying for me to reproduce work I have done before. Great idea in theory, at least.

Off now to look at mixing some Al Jazeera footage with kittens falling off a table.

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Ruth Suehle | June 3, 2011
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If you find Al Jazeera cats falling off a table, I want to see it. Better--I want to see it remixed with the "I like turtles" kid.

But really, this might be an opportunity to tell clients about CC licenses, and some of them would probably say yes. They might just not know what it's all about.

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Craig Harffey | June 3, 2011
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Ruth,

Some of my clients couldn't even spell creative commons, let alone understand it! ;-)

Problem is typically catch-22, as anything I produce for them they are paying top dollar for and unlikely to want to share - it's the future clients who would benefit from reusing effort by saving time.

We would need to incentivise clients to release material for CC or move the perceived value from the material itself.

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