It’s been a year since YouTube launched its Creative Commons video library, inviting people to upload videos that could be repurposed and remixed for brand new content.
Since then, over 4 million Creative Commons-licensed videos are hosted on YouTube and are ready for your creative mind. In case you were wondering, Flickr is the champion when it comes to the most Creative Commons-licensed photos.
On the YouTube blog today, CEO of Creative Commons (CC), Cathy Casserly, shared her thoughts on how important YouTube is for creativity with video. Here’s what she had to say:
Since the Creative Commons video library launch on YouTube a year ago, you’ve added more than 40 years worth of video to the mix. Anyone, anywhere can edit, build on and republish the library’s videos for free thanks to the Creative Commons Attribution license, otherwise known as CC BY.
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.
If you’d like to go back and add the CC BY license to your videos, just edit them and go to the “License and rights ownership” menu:
Also, YouTube is announcing today that you can now choose to license all of your future uploads under CC BY as a default. Here’s a quick video that might talk you into sharing your content with others, as really cool things can come out of it:
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