YouTube opens the floodgates on Creative Commons remixing

YouTube, humanity's realtime archive and perhaps the most important music site in the world, have teamed up with Creative Commons to allow users to "remix" over 10,000 videos.

To celebrate YouTube’s sixth birthday, it has partnered with Creative Commons to allow internet users to remix and create mashups of video content on the website. All video-editing must be done through YouTube’s bespoke editing software, and the new terms allow copyright owners to assign a Creative Commons license to their content. An initial deal between American cable television network, C-SPAN, and Arabic independent broadcaster, Al Jazeera, will offer 10,000 videos under a Creative Commons license. Fun fact! It would take one viewer watching YouTube continuously, 24 hours a day, over 1,710 years to watch every video on the site, and every minute another day’s worth of content is uploaded. This number is about to get even bigger.

In April, YouTube introduced its Copyright School in the US, which is designated to stem unlicensed content on its platform by directing infringing uploaders to its new copyright education programme. Under these new terms and conditions on the site, the ‘punishment’ for anyone who post content that broke copyright would be to watch an education video and pass a quiz in order to regain their ‘status’ in posting video.

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