YouTube has introduced multiple Creative Commons options for video uploaders and video remixers. This opens up thousands of clips to be used in videos and allows creators to offer more liberal licensing to other users of the site.
Creative Commons
The Creative Commons licensing system has been around since 2002 and allowed content creators to easily license their works on the Internet. There are six different Creative Commons licenses available, ranging from Attribution Alone to Attribution + Noncommercial + ShareAlike. All of which make various demands of those using the licensed works.
Creative Commons has been used extensively on photographs, with Flickr now hosting almost 200 million images licensed under the system. But video hasn’t really made the most of the Creative Commons licensing system. At least until now.
CC-By-3.0 On YouTube
When you upload a video to YouTube at the moment it is automatically assigned the Standard YouTube License, but from now on uploaders will have the opportunity to assign it the CC-By-3.0 license, which allows a user to share and remix the content as long as attribution is given. And this even applies to commercial use.
YouTube video creators can now also use more than 10,000 clips which the site has obtained through partnerships with C-SPAN, Public.Resource.org, Voice of America, Al Jazeera, and others. these can be incorporated into a work by using the YouTube Video Editor. All the newly created clips licensed under CC will also be added to the pot as time goes on.
YouTube has sought to make things as simple as possible, so attribution is automatically given, and just the one type of Creative Commons license is available. At least for now.
Conclusions
I’ve made use of Creative Commons licenses before, both when using images on websites and when uploading my own photos to Flickr. It can be confusing but thankfully YouTube has seen to it that the hard work has all but been removed from the equation.
With the sheer amount of video uploaded and viewed on YouTube this should help Creative Commons become standard in the world of online video.
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