Youtube requires that all uploaders own the copyright to the work they submit, and that the uploader give YT and the community a commercial reuse license.

It would be great to have YT use CC (I asked them a couple of years ago and didn’t get the sense they understood any of this at all) but Barak Obama’s talks are already under the manditory commercial reuse license (in other words, it’s not in question).

I’d like to see Obama spread all his videos all over as well (not just YT), and put them out under a “no rights reserved” – public domain license cuing people to the fact that the rights are public domain as well.

We believe that speeches of our President on a government site are public domain. We did some research and found several citation like this: http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1./treatise8.html “It can be assumed that, where a Government agency commissions a work for its own use merely as an alternative to having one of its own employees prepare the work, the right to secure a private copyright would be withheld.”

So even if a private contractor records government events for the government, it’s still owned by the people since they are not adding anything of value to the work.

Funny enough, I met one of the guys who ran whitehouse.gov for President Bush. When I asked him if the videos were in the public domain, he said “of course”. When I asked him why they didn’t make clear the copyright, he kind of shrugged.

Carl Malamund has done ground breaking work slogging through the lack of government asserting clear/false copyrights on public documents: http://public.resource.org

In the end, we’re talking about Youtube just letting creators choose the copyright they want. Blip.tv has done this for three years to great effect. All this is just about creating a structure in which we can be transparent with copyright for videos, instead of the shadowy world that exists now.

I think it’d be great for the Obama posts on YouTube to be licensed under CC, but they probably can’t be since even CC is a form of copyright and the government can’t produce copyright.

Of course, if the video was shot by a TV network (such as ABC News, who release a podcast version of the addresses, as I found out Yesterday on iTunes) then it could fall to the TV network to embrace CC, which seems hardly likely.

While I’m here, I’d like ot ask Flickr to carry along the CC license info with photo embeds.

You’ve got the license info, why not pass it along with the embed code, for your own work and others work that ou resue?

Thanks,
–Steve

There’s one point I’d like to add as it came up in a discussion at Web 2.0 Expo Europe recently: Besides the services implementing CC at all (preferably even as default), how can it be made easier for professionals to also use CC licensed content?

Example: If you’re a journalist working on a deadline and would like to use a CC licensed photo, it’s often tough to get in touch with the author quickly enough to sort out the commercial aspects in time.

Of course many authors put their stuff under a very liberal CC BY license, requiring only attribution and allowing freely for commercial use. The majority, though, it seems, goes for CC BY-NC-SA, allowing for non-commercial use, but not for commercial use. My guess is, though, that a lot of those authors wouldn’t mind having their images used commercially and making some money on the side as long as they have control over who uses them.

So my question to you: Would it make sense to implement (to phrase it overly simple) to implement a button on Flickr/YouTube/Blip etc. that gives authors a chance to say: click here, I’ll get a text message right away and you’ll get my “go”/”no go” within 5 mins. If the answer is yes, here’s my PayPal account, please send me $1.50. Thanks!

Maybe it’s not as easy, but I think CC could help those active in the long tail a great deal to both share their stuff for personal use and also make some cash on the side?

As for the YouTube medium, I’m sympathetic to the argument about proprietary formats, but the reality is 1) Obama is already using YouTube (and few other video sites (save Hulu?) would likely be able to support such bandwidth/hosting needs) 2) the Flash format is the most widely supported mechanism for delivering video content today. Ideally this will change someday, but for now, we must deal with the web as it is, since it’s being used in its “imperfect” state. Until we deal with the problem of rich-media delivery in non-proprietary formats, at least those who figure it out (or reshare someone else’s YouTube content to their own account) should be able to do so given proper licensing.

@stephen: I think you are basically correct, however I believe there are a few exceptions, such as postage stamps.

Also, while I agree with you that YouTube should make licensing more obvious, you can certainly license YouTube items now by stating your license and providing a link in the description.

Also, YouTube is kind of a horrible platform for free content, since it requires flash and provides no good way to download content in any format (and especially not in a free format).