Building and sharing educational videos has become relatively easy thanks to the enormous growth in bandwidth and the meteoric rise of YouTube itself, the world’s ubiquitous platform for video.
YouTube today is a great resource for educational videos (and many other types of videos). However, not everyone understands the impact of uploading videos on YouTube.
Most Educational content today is uploaded under YouTube’s standard license because that is a default option.
There is a better option for sharing educational content on YouTube — it is the Creative Commons License
From the Wikipedia definition for Creative Commons (CC) License
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted “work”.[note 1] A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that he or she (that author) has created
YouTube has the right to monetize Standard license videos;
YouTube was built for sharing all kinds of video. But monetizing educational content with ads can be very challenging without trying to do the right thing in terms of carefully selecting advertisers.
This is a big issue, especially when not all teachers / content creators intend to monetize them; and have inadvertently uploaded content using YouTube’s standard license.
It is also a problem because children are becoming heavily reliant on YouTube to access free content, and while well funded initiatives like Khan Academy have built open gardens of content — they all still use YouTube for hosting.
And thanks you YouTube’s not so intuitive upload process for tagging videos — even Khan academy’s licenses are tagged under YouTube’s standard license.
This despite the fact that Khan academy explicitly states that their content is available via creative commons (Creative Commons (CC-by-NC-SA) Licensing) on this help desk page.
YouTube’s standard content license prevents anyone else from accessing content from any other medium, other than YouTube’s own video player. Screenshot from YouTube’s terms of service
YouTube explicitly prevents downloading (more on this later).
By using it on YouTube, you are willingly contributing to both YouTube’s terrible personalization algorithms as well as their advertising engines. This is a topic worthy of a discussion in itself, but I will refrain from digressing.
YouTube’s implementation of Creative commons is also flawed;
YouTube intentionally discourages the user from selecting (CC) or understanding licensing of videos.
Tagging Videos on YouTube with Creative commons isn’t straightforward
Creative commons licensing as an option is embedded deep inside the “advanced settings” tab when trying to upload videos.
YouTube hides the CC licensing information at the lower most part of the screen and is only visible when you click “show more”
Search for creative commons content again is not exactly intuitive because licensing information is hidden
The single biggest problem
Is the fact that you cannot download any Creative Commons content even though CC licenses explicitly allow adaptation, and re-use of content.
This is simply because YouTube’s own terms of service supersedes the license terms.
In Conclusion — YouTube is bad for Educational content and especially bad for Content Licensed under Creative Commons.
YouTube actively discouraging Creative commons and not adopting Creative Commons licensing content correctly is a threat for Educational content providers who want to share their content freely to the world.
Creators of content — especially educational content should start doing a few things to remedy the situation:
- Host content explicitly as Creative commons, especially if the purpose was to distribute the content for free
- Write to YouTube to ask them to introduce a download button (and a programmatic API) to download content that has been uploaded.
- Host content elsewhere — even as plain video files.
- Get a paid hosted service, if that is financially sustainable.
- Ask YouTube to make license selection mandatory at the point of uploading a video and not make it default to their standard license.
- Spread awareness and educate people on the importance of sharing educational content via Creative Commons licenses.
