Friday, April 22, 2011

YouTube copyright school

This short video is Google's attempt to inform in a clear and light-hearted way about copyright issues on YouTube. The message is clear and YouTube have some effective mechanisms in place for alerting copyright infringement. However much more than this film is required to encourage users to follow the rules.

Since YouTube makes it so easy to copy and embed videos it's no surprise that everyone does it. If a film is copyright then the owner should be able to disable the embed button, but as long as it is in place then people will embed! I'd like to see YouTube fully adopting Creative Commons, making it simple to label a video with the relevant CC license and having the attribution built into the embed code. If I embed a film here the full attribution should automatically come with it. As it is now I enmbed and hope for the best.

A search function in YouTube for CC material, as already exists on Flickr, would help those of us who do want to abide by the rules. The problem with copyright and Creative Commons is that it is so complicated to follow the rules and as a result few people do so. CC has to be fully embedded in all content and it should be easy to label works with the right license as well as simple to search for free-to-use content. If not then don't be surprised that no-one bothers.

Thanks to The Clever Sheep for alerting me to this. See his post, Copyright school.

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