YouTube Now Supports Creative Commons Licensing, Remixing

Beginning at noon ET today, YouTube will roll out a new Creative Commons designation within the YouTube Video Editor which will allow video uploaders to license their work under the CC-By-3.0 license or to browse through a library of “over 10,000 Creative Commons videos,” including some uploaded by C-SPAN, PublicResource.org, Voice of America, and Al-Jazeera.

Especially neat is the set of possibilities this will open up for video remixers. Video uploaders who designate their work as Creative Commons allow other YouTube users to easily share and remix it, with proper credit, and would-be remixers will have access to an ever-expanding library of stuff to work with.

This doesn’t mean that those ever-present pirated Naruto and Family Guy clips on YouTube will suddenly belong to Creative Commons, however: According to Mashable, YouTube hopes that the addition of CC licensing will “help YouTubers get even more creative with their content — in a manner that protects the rights of all content creators,” and “anyone who tries to circumvent that rule [that users can only mark their own work as CC] will be subject to YouTube’s copyright protection services.”

(via Boing Boing, Mashable)