YouTube’s CC options for users and creators

Somehow I missed this.  I’ve focused on sharing the wealth of Creative Commons image and music resources with my students, but missed the video piece.

This past week, YouTube marked the first anniversary of its Creative Commons video library.  Over the year, YouTube has made more than 4 million royalty-free videos available to content creators, remixers, and viewers in general.

The CC BY license allows new editors to remix, re-imagine and republish videos with simple attribution.

In a guest post on the YouTube blog, Creative Commons CEO Cathy Casserly celebrated the availability of shared video content:

Do you need a professional opening for your San Francisco vacation video? Perhaps some gorgeous footage of the moon for your science project? How about a squirrel eating a walnut to accompany your hot new dubstep track? All of this and more is available to inspire and add to your unique creation. Thanks to CC BY, it’s easy to borrow footage from other people’s videos and insert it into your own, because the license grants you the specific permissions to do so as long as you give credit to the original creator.

But this part is new.

In her post, Casserly encouraged video producers not only to use, but to contribute:

You can pass on the creative spirit when you publish your video, by choosing the option to license it under CC BY so that others can reuse and remix your footage with the YouTube Video Editor. This is where the fun really starts. Imagine seeing your footage used by a student in Mumbai, a filmmaker in Mexico City, or a music video director in Detroit. By letting other people play with your videos, you let them into a global sandbox, kicking off a worldwide team of collaborators. We all yearn to create and contribute – now you can join the fun, and open the door to collective imagination.

YouTube contributors may now choose to grant the CC BY license, instead of the Standard YouTube license, to their original videos by selecting Creative Commons Attribution license from the License and rights ownership menu.  They may also choose to set these options as upload defaults.

The YouTube Creative Commons page offers instruction.

The Upload Defaults page now offers these options.

The many young filmmakers in our midst are going to need an update on this one as well as some guidance on thinking through how they want others to use their original work.

Filed under: copyright, creative commons, intellectual property, video