Practical Difficulties with Creative Commons Licensing
I don’t think that, statistically speaking, I’m a complete idiot, but I’ve just spent the past 20 minutes trying to figure out how to put some text on a video displaying a Creative Commons license. This post doesn’t criticize the Creative Commons scheme at all, it just says, “I wish they made their web site easier to use for me–and maybe for other newbies.”
First of all, when you click on the easy-to-find “License Your Work” link, you are brought to a license wizard. But the “more info” links are confusing. For example, if you are choosing whether to allow commercial uses of your work, the “more info” is written for a “Noncommercial” license–which allows commercial uses, with the author’s permission. So does “Noncommercial” allow commercial use? I don’t know.
The same for the “Allow modifications of your work.” The default radio button selects “Yes,” but the “more info” link is about “No derivative works”–which is confusing.
OK, so I figure I want an Attribution-Noncommercial license for video. So I get a page that gives me some icons/buttons and some HTML to cut and paste. But how do you cut and paste an icon or HTML into a video? Isn’t there some text I can put on the first or last screen? No. I only have stuff I can put on a web site. But if I’m going to upload this up onto YouTube?
And on YouTube… There’s no clear link telling me about what my rights are when I upload a video to YouTube. As the creator, I have the copyright. But do I give it up to YouTube when I upload it there? They’re pretty clear about what happens if your copyright is violated by someone else uploading to YouTube, but they should be more helpful in letting me know how my rights are protected when I upload my stuff.
At this point, the only thing I definitely know how to do is to put the “(c) 2007″ on my video. I think that I can also put:
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/; or, (b) send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
But I’m not entirely clear about this. I think it should be clearer.
My first major idiot moment of the day is when I leave my keys and lock myself out of my apartment every morning. This morning, that will be the second major idiot moment of my day.
Update: A lot of my questions are answered in the FAQ. But I think that they’re fairly obvious questions, and I shouldn’t have to search so long for it.
Also, I decided to try the CC Publisher application to publish my video - but the link takes me to a 403 Forbidden page. (02/28/07 19:56 EST)
And, just for the record, here’s the video of Yei, South Sudan (with the copyright and the unfortunately illegible (because of resolution issues) CC statement).