Mountain View, California — Google owned popular video-sharing site YouTube, which caters to some of the more creative individuals online continues to add features that empower the people who create mesmerizing content. YouTube, over the weekend introduced a new feature that will spell a boon for aspiring videographers, has set up a library of videos carrying the Creative Commons license, that creators can easily reuse and incorporate into their work, the video sharing service said on Thursday in its blog.
However, the copyright licenses from Creative Commons empowers licensors to retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work, at least non-commercially, according to Creative Commons.
The new feature will entitle users a large selection of video clips from all types of subject areas that they can then share, edit, and remix; this means anyone can reuse a video tagged Creative Commons, as long as they give credit to its original creators.
Stace Peterson, a software engineer at YouTube, said in a company blog post that this new section of YouTube is being commenced with a group of more than 10,000 videos that is already CC-licensed; “We are working with organizations like like C-SPAN, Public.Resource.org, Voice of America, Al Jazeera and others,” Peterson wrote.
The addition of Creative Commons licenses to YouTube will make it easier for videographers who wants to increase their exposure if other users want to use clips or remix that content will be able to edit directly in YouTube’s editor. They are required to credit the original, but YouTube’s editor conveniently takes care of that, with a tool that automatically displays the source videos.
Appending Creative Commons tags will also protect YouTube on the copyright front by clearly distinguishing what clips users can use freely and what they cannot.
To locate a video that is licensed under the Creative Commons license, users have to search using the YouTube search bar or from within the YouTube Video Editor. A CC tab guides users to content available under a Creative Commons license.
The CC BY license is defined by Creative Commons as the “most considerate” of the licenses it offers. “This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation,” it said on its site. Creative Commons has five other licenses.
Finally, the new option will definitely be a big publicity boost for Creative Commons, a non-profit co-founded by digital copyright guru Lawrence Lessig. The importance of CC-licensing is to empower creators of all types of media to part with some of their rights to allow greater sharing–to replace “all rights reserved” with “some rights reserved.” Ultimately, Creators can specifically retain the rights that may be important to them, such as the right to use the work commercially.
This novel feature will be a useful tool for re-mixers and forward-thinking content owners who realize that allowing more sharing — for at least some content — is the smart choice in the digital age. Because, every minute, 35 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, most of it user-created.
However, enabling Creative Commons may help hammer down some of the raucous debates on YouTube about copyrights. The company has had to set up strict rules to insure that companies feel safe posting videos on the site, and users do not edit them without permission.