YouTube and Creative Commons: raising the bar on user creativity

Have you ever been in the process of creating a video and just needed that one perfect clip to make it pop? Maybe you were creating your own music video and needed an aerial video of Los Angeles at night to spice it up. Unless you had a helicopter, a pretty powerful camera and some fierce editing skills, this would have been a big challenge. Now, look no further than the Creative Commons library accessible through YouTube Video Editor to make this happen. Creative Commons provides a simple way to license and use creative works.

You can now access an ever-expanding library of Creative Commons videos to edit and incorporate into your own projects. To find a video, just search in the YouTube search bar or from within the YouTube Video Editor. We’re working with organizations like C-SPAN, Public.Resource.org, Voice of America, Al Jazeera and others, so that over 10,000 Creative Commons videos are available for your creative use.

To get started, visit youtube.com/editor and select the CC tab:

Any video you create using Creative Commons content will automatically show the source videos’ titles underneath the video player:

As part of the launch of Creative Commons licensing on YouTube, you’ll also be able to mark any or all of your videos with the Creative Commons CC-BY license that lets others share and remix your work, so long as they give you credit. To mark your video with the Creative Commons license, select ‘Creative Commons Attribution license’ on the upload page or on the Video Description page:

You can learn more about Creative Commons on YouTube at our help center, and remember that all content must still follow the rules in our Copyright Center.

We’re excited to see what you come up with!

Stace Peterson, Software Engineer

(This is a cross post from the Official YouTube Blog)

Content Licenses Now Available for Your Open Source Project

By Logan Hanks, Software Engineering Team

Open source projects often consist of much more than just source code. Resources like documentation and artwork are a significant component of many projects, but sometimes licenses designed for source code are not very appropriate for sharing these resources. To that end we have now made it possible for projects hosted on code.google.com to choose a content license in addition to their source code license.


Content license choices include the Creative Commons Attribution license and the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. You can use this setting to indicate the terms under which your project's non-source code materials may be distributed. Just look for the "separate content license" checkbox and select box in the "Administer" tab of your project. The setting is also available when you're creating a project.


If you choose a content license for your project, we will display it along with your source code license on your project's home page. This will make it clear to everyone the terms by which they can share your project's content, including wiki pages.

Another Busy "While" for Open Source Googlers

By Cat Allman, Open Source Team

With a tip of the hat to Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter, it's a busy "while" for the Open Source Team here at Google.

Leslie Hawthorn is in Durban, South Africa, speaking at the Third OpenMRS Implementers Meeting, 17-20 June 2008. The meeting is being held in conjunction with HISA 2008, the annual conference of the South African Health Informatics Association. OpenMRS is a community developed, Open Source, enterprise electronic medical record system framework, specifically intended to help those actively building and managing health systems in the developing world, where AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria afflict the lives of millions. If you are interested in Open Source health informatics and/or health care in developing parts of the world, take a look at the project.

Yesterday our office in Mountain View CA hosted the Creative Commons Technology Summit. Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that builds tools that help realize the full potential of the commons in the age of digital networks. Their first technology summit brought together many parties interested in making sure "Copyright 2.0" facilitates rather than hinders innovation and the open web. The summit included an update and overview of Creative Commons technologies, panels featuring other leaders in open digital rights technologies, and a look at the future, including the role of digital copyright registries (and similar animals). Check out the online coverage, and stay tuned for the video of the event, which we will post soon.

Also this week, the GCC Developers Summit, sponsored in part by Google, returned to Ottawa, Ontario, Canada for a 3 day "meeting of the minds" by the core development team behind the GNU Compiler Collection. Several Googlers presented; Vinodha Ramasamy spoke on Feedback Directed Optimization using Synthetic Edge Profiles from Hardware Event Sampling, Ian Lance Taylor gave a talk about A New ELF Linker, and Diego Novillo gave a tutorial on Tuples - A new data structure and API for GIMPLE.

Next week we are hosting another conclave in Mountain View, California, USA; Eclipse Day will be held on June 24. This half day event for developers is a chance to learn about different Eclipse projects and related technologies. Googlers speaking include Sergey Prigogin on What's New in CDT Ganymede , Bruce Johnson on Tools Make the Difference: GWT in Eclipse, and Xavier Ducrohet on Android's Eclipse Toolset . Unfortunately / fortunately, the event is completely full, and registration including the waiting list is closed, so if you are not already registered you can't join us, but watch for reports on the event later next week.

Also next week, USENIX Annual Technical Conference will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Googler David Presotto is chairing the Short Paper Session at this venerable but always tasty technical conference.

It's shaping up to be a busy summer... :)

Ed. Note: Post updated to fix formatting.

Updates from the Free Software Foundation

By Chris DiBona, Open Source Team

Google's Open Source Team is a proud supporter of many Free and Open Source technical and advocacy organizations. From time to time, we ask that these colleagues give an update to the community about their latest and greatest achievements. Peter Brown, Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation, was kind enough to write in to us:

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) recently held its annual members meeting at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. The meeting is a chance to reflect upon the achievements of the year past and plan for the year ahead. Google has supported our work in the past through our corporate patron program, and this year they have just confirmed that they are renewing their support once again. This seems like a good occasion then to brief Google followers on what work we have been doing and what you can expect from the FSF in the year ahead.

The FSF launched the GNU GPLv3 on June 29, 2007. This was the culmination of an 18-month period to redraft the world's most popular free software license. I am pleased to report that not only have we published a license that protects free software from the latest attempts to make it proprietary, but we have also seen widespread adoption, including developer and corporate support. We have also updated and launched the GNU LGPLv3 and created a new license: the GNU Affero GPLv3. You may have also heard that the FSF, Wikimedia and Creative Commons are cooperating over the new GNU GFDL — the license currently used for all articles on Wikipedia. You can find out more about FSF copyleft licensing at the FSF Licensing and Compliance Lab.

With the release of the GNU AGPLv3, we have also started to make progress on how to tackle the issue of computer user freedom and web services. To that end, we recently hosted a summit, "Freedom for Web Services," as a launching point for a year-long community discussion on this topic. Reports from that summit will be published soon.

The Free Software Foundation sponsors the ongoing development of the GNU project — and many new GNU projects are added every year. GNU now stretches far beyond the core system components found in the typical GNU/Linux distribution. Apart from our own projects we also work to highlight those projects that have a strategic importance to free software. The FSF high priority projects list is currently under review following a recent rash of success, and we hope to relaunch in April with a new set of targets for software development.

In 2008, the FSF will be marking the 25th anniversary of the launch of the GNU project — the starting point for the free operating system GNU/Linux, and the free software movement. We are planning to mark the anniversary with a public awareness campaign. Expect to see lots of people talking about free software during the year ahead. In preparation for that campaign we have updated our website, www.fsf.org, with a new friendly look as we welcome a new audience of users to free software.

Speaking of celebrations, Happy Document Freedom Day! Our campaign for Open Document has been underway since October 2005, and we are helping spread awareness of the need for our public institutions to hold records in formats that we can all utilize. You can join us in this process by sending an email or letter to your national or local government officials or government agencies and politicians. Getting your voice heard on this issue will go a long way in preparing the political ground for the acceptance of free and open formats. There are many other ways you can get involved beyond our Open Document efforts. Head over to our campaign center now or look through our volunteer section to find something that you can get active with.

Part of our public awareness campaign is a major free software event to be held in Massachusetts in the summer of 2009. We are working in collaboration with local educational institutions and other stakeholders to develop an event that will bring developers and users together in a fun and interesting way. We also aim to use the event to highlight the need to draw more young women into computer science. Google's own Leslie Hawthorn has generously joined our planning committee, and you will probably hear updates from her later this year.

Google's support is great to have, but we receive the bulk of our funding from individual contributors and much of the work is done by volunteers. You can join the Free Software Foundation as an Associate Member — it's a great way to get involved and stay connected with our work.

Many thanks to Peter for this report.