YouTube & Creative Commons Partnership Will Open Creative Floodgates

Start­ing at 9 pm PDT tonight, YouTube will make 10,000 Cre­ative Com­mons videos avail­able to any­one using YouTube’s video edi­tor. Ini­tial­ly the Cre­ative Com­mons library will be loaded with videos from C‑SPAN, Public.Resource.org, Voice of Amer­i­ca, and Al Jazeera, and you can bet that more con­tent providers will be added down the line.

This part­ner­ship will let video/filmmakers unleash their cre­ativ­i­ty and pro­duce some extra­or­di­nary video remix­es – à la Don­ald Dis­cov­ers Glenn Beck – with­out run­ning the risk of legal com­pli­ca­tions. And because the Cre­ative Com­mons library will be stocked only with videos released under a less restric­tive CC-BY license, the result­ing remix­es can have com­mer­cial ambi­tions. A boon for some.

Final­ly, we should­n’t miss anoth­er impor­tant com­po­nent of this part­ner­ship: Mov­ing for­ward, any video­mak­er can release their own cre­ative work under a CC license on YouTube. Fast for­ward 6 t0 18 months, and the Cre­ative Com­mons library will be vast,  and the remix oppor­tu­ni­ties, end­less. A good day for open cul­ture.

via YouTube’s blog and GigaOm