YouTube topped all records today by tallying up 4 million Creative Commons-licensed videos in its trove -- more than any other video hosting company in the world.
This means that users have literally millions of choices for snipping bits of footage, adding scenes, and building onto videos they're making. Everything in this collection comes branded with the Creative Commons Attribution license, meaning users don't have to get explicit permission to use the content from the creators.
YouTube launched its Creative Commons video library last year and since then it said its users have added in "40 years' worth of video." Much of the content is from well-known media distributors, such as C-SPAN, Voice of America, and Al Jazeera.
Creative Commons licensing has been available for some time on a growing number of video- and photo-sharing sites. Yahoo's Flickr has the record for the most Creative Commons-licensed photos, and Vimeo started up its Creative Commons-licensed videos in 2010.
[Source: cnet]