YouTube is now the largest depository of Creative Commons videos that are free to be reused or remixed for free by anyone with the desire to do so. This places it alongside Flickr, which is currently number one for CC photographs.
YouTube CC Video Library
This time last year saw YouTube unveil the Creative Commons video library, accessible right from within the YouTube Video Editor. At the time YouTube announced 10,000 videos were on offer under the CC BY license which allows anyone to reuse or remix a video as long as they give credit.
The library was conceived as being “ever-expanding,” and ordinary users were invited to also label their videos with the CC By license. This was alongside organizations such as C-SPAN, Al Jazeera, and Voice of America. This move now looks to have paid off in a big way.
4 Million & Counting
According to a post on the Official YouTube Blog, the number of Creative Commons videos on the site has now surpassed 4 million. This means YouTube is now home to the largest collection of CC videos on the InterWebs.
That sum of 4 million is pretty hard to get your head around, but it’s suggested that it would take 40 years to watch them all. Not that YouTube wants you to watch them, instead the Google-owned site wants you to get involved by editing or building upon this colossal stock of free-to-use videos.
The idea is then for you to offer your video up under the CC By license as well, adding more videos to the burgeoning list. You can now do this for all your future videos by default, meaning you’ll be adding to the vast pool of video that’s available to all.
Conclusions
This is an astonishing achievement, especially as the total of 4 million videos was reached in just 12 months. It means that anyone can now create a YouTube video, even if they don’t ever shoot original footage. All they need do is combine other people’s CC-licensed content into something new and they’re a content creator.
