Youtube is always thinking about the health of their community ecosystem. Over the last five years of explosive growth they’ve maintained their focus on community, while also helping the “hits” and established stars thrive. My former company Warner was the first music company do a deal with Youtube, and I learned early on how important maintaing and growing the community dynamic was to Youtube’s evolution.
THE EDITOR
Professional creators and amateurs creating their own content and working together on the same platform is what makes YouTube so exciting! The video editor launched almost a year ago and it was a great community tool that opened up YouTube as a creation platform. The in browser editor allows drag and drop assembly of clips from your youtube library, and basic editing and trimming of each clip.
CREATIVE COMMONS ADDED TO VIDEO EDITOR
This week YouTube took the video editor to the next level by adding thousands of clips under Creative Commons license. The Creative Commons Video Clips are royalty free clips that you can use to make and mix with your own creations legally. You can even commercialize the your new work, as long as you credit the source.
Doesn’t Youtube’s move elevate the CC license to a new status? Wont more youtubers be familiar with how CC works than traditional copyright? Will youtube shine a spotlight and increase the amount of users on youtube who upload there stuff with CC for us all to use?
How long until we see the first youtube superstar that only uses existing CC source material?
“It’s as if all the Creative Commons videos were part of your personal library,” explained Product Manager Jason Toff
If your not familiar with cc liscenses, there are several “flavors” but most use the broadest one:
Attribution CC
This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
PLAY IT FORWARD AND MAKE YOUR OWN CLIPS CREATIVE COMMONS
You can also publish your own content as Creative commons and have it available via the editor to other youtubers. Cool! I made this clip only with CC videos and music available to use for free in the editor.
At least we’re seeing a bold vision! A two way street of open source video content allowing anyone to use it? The remix culture many on the net have been asking for but with video? I cant wait to see how this evolves.
YouTube Blog post: YouTube and Creative Commons: raising the bar on user creativity
