Vimeo Integrates Creative Commons Licenses

I’ve been a huge fan of Vimeo since its launch – a beautiful, simple interface, a super creative and active filmmaking community and a platform that made it easy to share your videos.  However, Vimeo was always way behind Blip.tv and Archive.org on the video platform side of things with regards to integrating the power and potential of Creative Commons for its users and the larger movement of remixing culture.

Fortunately, Vimeo has seen the light and it now supports all six of Creative Commons’ licenses!  If you’re not familiar with Creative Commons (CC), please take a few moments to learn about their licenses and how creators can identify how others may use, remix, share or make derivatives (or not) off of their work.  CC isn’t new on the scene, artists from Beastie Boys and Radiohead to massive platforms like Wikipedia and the White House are using CC.

Vimeo has a simple blog post on this exciting development and an overview of what it means for its users.  Also, it appears that Vimeo is also working on bulk-license selection (pretty dreamy for those of us with a lot of videos) and the ability to search by license.   There were reports last year that YouTube was going to test out the CC integration with some of its select users.  For all creators and viewers, hopefully this move by Vimeo will help nudge YouTube to embrace Creative Commons as well…

We at WITNESS have been working on incorporating Creative Commons licenses with our own work, and have been evangelical about CC through our trainings and partnerships (check out CC in our online video advocacy toolkit).  And, full disclosure, the CEO of Creative Commons, Joi Ito, is also one of our dynamo board members.  Clearly, he and his team are on a great track.