YouTube editor meets Creative Commons

Posted by Steve Hull on Friday 03 June 2011 at 8:25am
Tags: creative commons | licensing | video | youtube |

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Creative Commons / Jayel Aheram / CC BY 2.0

The YouTube editor has been around for a while.  It's a basic, "mash-up" type, cloud-based editing system, providing a basic set of transitions and the ability to add a music track.  However, it's just become a lot more intersting with YouTube's addition of easy Creative Commons licensing, allowing anyone to copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works based on it if they give the author credit.

When you upload a video you have the option of giving it a CC licence.  Furthermore, once in the YouTube editor you are able to search for CC content which you can then add to your clips. You can then edit the CC material you have found as well as your own material to your heart's content as long as the resulting video is also given a CC licence.  Sounds simple -- but there are a few more things you should know.

First, there are a number of different CC licences.  The one being used by YouTube is CC (BY), which, while giving the above permissions, makes no distinction between commercial and non-commercial works.  This means that any material you upload may be used for commercial purposes, so long as attrribution is given.

Second, the easy searching for CC material from the YouTube editor doesn't appear to work yet. As a result you may find that, although there's CC material on YouTube, you spend a lot of time trying to find it.

And third, YouTube states that any videos created using material obtained off YouTube may have advertising attached to them.

None of this means that you can't begin to create, distribute and work with CC video on YouTube, but it's worth keeping all these things in mind when doing so.  If you're OK with all of these considerations, then go have fun.

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