Gabriel Saldaña's blog » Digital rights Law & Freedom

YouTube offers Creative Commons licensing for video uploads

Gabriel Saldaña — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 06:34:32 +0000

Today I uploaded my monster truck videos to YouTube and found the surprise that they are now offering the option to publish your videos under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

That is great news! YouTube is the biggest online video community and it was lacking this option, unlike its competitors Vimeo and Blip.tv.

But what does this mean?

Before this, all user uploads were licensed with full copyright, the famous “All Rights Reserved”, which means that if you want to use, distribute, share or remix (create a derivative work) you had to obtain explicit consent from the video author for doing so. This new option of licensing is a very important deal, because it meas that being the big video distributor that YouTube is, it will be a great platform for a lot of commons content that we can share, use and remix (of course, only material published under the CC-BY license by the author).

Although they are not giving users the ability to choose from all the six Creative Commons licenses available, they made a very smart choice of simplifying the options to the users by offering only the most free one. It benefits us all in the tech and culture worlds.

Free Culture = Free World

If you wish to change all your previously uploaded videos to CC license, you can go to your list of uploaded videos, mark the checkboxes on the left on all videos (or just mark the top one to auto select all), click the “Actions” button and select the menu option “Creative Commons (CC-BY)”.

I hope to see CC licensing in other Google products like Picasa web albums, like Flickr does. But anyways, the YouTube offer is a great milestone for Creative Commons. Lets just wait and see what new creations and remixes this move brings to the world.

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Youtube Copyright School video

Gabriel Saldaña — Thu, 05 May 2011 00:57:35 +0000

This video is horrible! It reminds me of the 50′s anti socialism/communism propaganda with the voice, tone and the graphic tactics used in it.

And while it doesn’t omit the topic of Fair Use, it does try to avoid it, or so it seems, by speeding up the audio and moving the letters so you can’t read the text about it comfortably.

What’s funny is that all the examples mentioned as a copyright violation are examples of maybe about 90% of the videos in YouTube.

I remember those days where you could “freely” make a cassette tapes with romantic dedicated tracks for your girlfriend. I think things like this make it clear that those days are over…just when you could send video instead of audio and instantly instead of waiting to deliver the tape.

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Gave DRM talk at UANL

Gabriel Saldaña — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 04:47:56 +0000

Today I gave a talk about DRM technologies and how they affect everyone that consumes products with them. It took place at the UANL physics and mathematics faculty.

It interests me very much the fact that its the second time they invite me to give this talk (and I hope to get invited many more) because typically at schools and universities, at least in general in Mexico, this topic never shows up on anyone’s radar. Probably software licensing, but not DRM technologies and issues.

I hope more universities follow this trend and call people to talk to them about current topics and not just stick to the education program and teach how to be code monkeys.

Maybe it has something to do with the mathematics (cryptography) on the DRM technologies and that’s why I got invited by the physics and mathematics faculty instead of the computer science faculty. I thought about that so I updated my talk and slides to explain a bit more on the cryptography side (very basic stuff) this time.

The talk went very well and got good response from the audience. I even gave out stickers!

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Facebook terms for your uploaded content

Gabriel Saldaña — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 01:55:30 +0000

Maybe this is old news, but I was checking Facebook’s terms of use to see if something had changed since the last time I saw them. But everytime I read this, I keep getting surprised and annoyed. The following is the exact quote from the terms of use that makes me think twice about uploading any pictures to my photo gallery.

I’ve highlighted the parts you should watch out for:

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.

And the other day I found some local TV advertising studio photographs, from the biggest TV network in latinamerica, posted on the photographer’s photo gallery. He could get sued by his client!

Good think Flickr exists and provides us with our own licensing terms. And even more for providing the option of Creative commons licensing.

It would be interesting and a huge challenge, to come up with a social networking site like Facebook that follows the Franklin Street statement.

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Gabriel Saldaña's blog » Digital rights Law & Freedom

YouTube offers Creative Commons licensing for video uploads

But what does this mean?

Free Culture = Free World

Youtube Copyright School video

Gave DRM talk at UANL

More ugly stories about depending on cloud computing

Google marking all sites as unsafe

Youtube’s fair use massacre

“Before the storm” image is Creative Commons by Steve Wall.

Facebook terms for your uploaded content