YouTube Adds Creative Commons to Clips, Allows Legal Remixing

  • Share
  • Read Later

YouTube wants you to start using other people’s content – well, within reason. The Google-owned video site launched a new feature yesterday that gives users access to more than 10,000 videos under Creative Commons license for remixing or editing in YouTube’s editor, which will automatically cite and source the original.

The site’s Creative Commons library offers videos from organizations like C-SPAN, Public.Resource.org, Voice of America and Al Jazeera for editing under a CC-By-3.0 license, which allows for sharing, remixing/adapting and commercial use of the original, as long as the original author is credited.

Creative Commons licenses have been popular for years on photo-sharing site Flickr, but their appearance on YouTube marks a step forward for both the video site and for the Creative Commons organization – a nonprofit that, in its own words, “develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.”

Here’s hoping that it’s also a successful step, so that some big U.S. content creators sign up to the program, and bring us one step closer to remix singularity.