YouTube Adds Access to a Library of Video Content With Creative Commons (CC-BY) Licensing

A growing collection (about 10,000 videos at the moment) CC licensed video (CC BY to be specific) is now available by accessing the YouTube Video Editor.

From the YouTube Blog:

You can now access an ever-expanding library of Creative Commons videos to edit and incorporate into your own projects. To find a video, just search in the YouTube search bar or from within the YouTube Video Editor. We’re working with organizations like C-SPAN, Public.Resource.org, Voice of America, Al Jazeera and others, so that over 10,000 Creative Commons videos are available for your creative use.

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As part of the launch of Creative Commons licensing on YouTube, you’ll also be able to mark any or all of your videos with the Creative Commons CC-BY license that lets others share and remix your work, so long as they give you credit.

The remainder of the blog post includes several screenshots of the new CC tool.

See Also: “YouTube Launches Support For CC BY and a CC Library Featuring 10,000 Videos'” (via Creative Commons Blog)

See Also: “Why YouTube Adopting Creative Commons Is a Big Deal” (via GigaOM)

However, there’s another interesting aspect to the choice of license: Creative Commons has in the past been struggling with the fact that the majority of users tends to adopt more restrictive licenses. The organization estimated that two out of three Creative Commons-licensed works can’t be reused commercially, and one out of four can’t be reincorporated into a new work at all.

CC-BY on the other hand allows commercial reuse as well. This doesn’t just open YouTube and its producers new revenue opportunities it also makes it possible to reuse these videos in a much wider variety of contexts. Wikipedia, for example, demands that any videos posted to its site can be reused commercially. Combine that with the fact that YouTube has been converting its entire catalog into the open source WebM format, and there’s little reason why tens of thousands of Creative Commons-licensed YouTube videos shouldn’t show up on Wikipedia any day now.

Filed under: Associations and Organizations, Libraries, Patrons and Users, Video Recordings