[Foundation-l] YouTube and Creative Commons

Platonides Platonides at gmail.com
Fri Jun 3 22:26:44 UTC 2011


Jon Harald Søby wrote:
> With the news that YouTube will start letting users choose to upload their
> videos under CC-by, what will be the way we deal with it? Should we open for
> embedding videos directly from YouTube, or should they be uploaded to
> Commons first? The only reason I can see for not allowing embedding is that
> embedding would be promoting YouTube; but that is still much better than the
> alternative, IMO, which would be a big hassle for editors, and could take a
> huge chunk of our resources (and when there is a good alternative like in
> this case, why should we burden ourselves with that?). Any thoughts?

We should not allow YouTube hotlinking.
That would be reliying on a third party for our contents.
We would need to differenciate between free/unfree videos before 
allowing embedding.
Will they provide a history of license transitions? (how to check if a 
video was ever free).
Too easy to slip a vandal video and embed it (eg. we can't block the 
uploader).
A third party shall not be able to know what articles our visitors are 
reading / watching (ie. privacy policy).
I am not aware of any limitation in our resources for serving the videos 
ourselves.

On the other hand, we should help and encourage migration of free videos 
to Wikimedia Commons.
Actually, there's nothing new in how to proceed, this is just the same 
case as Flickr but with videos instead of images.





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