YouTube has added the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) as a licensing option for users! Now when users upload video, they can choose to license it under CC BY or to remain with the default “Standard YouTube License.” Users may also change the license on existing videos by editing each video individually.

In conjunction with the implementation, YouTube has launched a Creative Commons video library containing 10,000 videos under CC BY from organizations such as C-SPAN, PublicResource.org, Voice of America, and Al Jazeera. The library will serve as a base catalog of videos for users to access, edit, and incorporate into their own video projects. The YouTube Video Editor now contains a CC tab that allows users to search the Creative Commons video library and select videos to edit and remix. Users may remix videos directly on the editor platform, and any video that is created using CC BY-licensed content will automatically display the linked source videos’ titles underneath the video player. Since CC BY is enabled as a licensing option, the library will grow as more users choose to license their work under CC BY.

PC World just published a blog on Open Source Software called “Is Open Source Up to Par? Just Ask the DoD.” When you add the Department of Defense’s Open Technology Development report to the recent decision by the Department of Labor to require a Creative Commons open license on all educational content produced with the $2 billion Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College And Career Training (TAACCCT) grants, you can see the start of a trend in the US government towards using open licensing as a way to increase efficiency. The big idea for the field of education is that government has a new, more efficient option for creating and distributing educational materials: competitive grants that carry an open license requirement.

“Old School”
Here’s the old model: College students and K-12 institutions buy textbooks from publishers. Publishers pay authors and editors to develop and maintain the content, so naturally they want to make as much as possible on that investment. The publishers also own the copyright and hold the exclusive rights to distribute, revise, and redistribute the content to schools or college students. Why should government interfere or care? #1) The cost of textbooks has tripled since 1986. #2) Since nearly half of US college students use government grants or loans to pay for their textbooks, rising textbook costs are transferred back to the taxpayer. And by the way, US student loan debt just passed credit card debt, hovering around $830 billion. Yeah, we could use a good idea right about now.

The new model
Since taxpayers end up paying the bill for textbooks either way, why not launch a competitive grant process and require the winners to include a shareable license to the digital learning materials they produce? That’s exactly what the Department of Labor is doing with $2 billion in funding. Because we are talking about open, digital content anyone will be able to access, modify, adapt, and improve the resulting educational materials. The cost of making a million copies of a digital textbook is not much more than the cost of the first copy. And if you want it printed, no problem. Printed and bound versions of open textbooks end up costing between 5 and 20 dollars per book.

Requiring open licenses on digital works created with government grants and contracts allows competition and innovation to continue *after* the educational content is created. This is because anyone can access the digital content, build on it, and improve it. Print-on-demand solutions, assessment tools, and customized versions can be added to the original at relatively low cost. But publishers who enhance and resell the content will have add enough new value to compete with the original, free version and with other innovators. This competition will help keep prices low, which is good for students, schools, and in the long run, good for taxpayers. The “open” model doesn’t put anyone out of business — it actually allows everyone to compete and innovate indefinitely.

So what about the guns and the penguins?
Open licenses create efficiencies. This is as true for software as it is for textbooks, as the Department of Defense has learned. From the PC World article:

As with Rifles, So with Software

The DoD then goes on to provide a nice analogy: “Imagine if only the manufacturer of a rifle were allowed to clean, fix, modify or upgrade that rifle. The military often finds itself in this position with taxpayer funded, contractor developed software: one contractor with a monopoly on the knowledge of a military software system and control of the software source code.”

That has a familiar ring to it too, doesn’t it?

“This is optimal only for the monopoly contractor,” the document goes on to point out, “but creates inefficiencies and ineffectiveness for the government, reduction of opportunities for the industrial base, severely limits competition for new software upgrades, depletes resources that can be used to better effect and wastes taxpayer-provided funds.”

I don’t think I could have put it better myself.

Open technology, by contrast, offers increased agility and flexibility, faster delivery, increased innovation, reduced risk, lower cost and information assurance and security, the DoD asserts.

There is much more to say on this subject, but I’ll pause here for your comments and critiques. Yes, we should still pay textbook authors fairly to build and maintain learning content, and yes, publishers can still offer useful services. Yet I see no reason for government to directly or indirectly fund proprietary K-12 and college textbook publishing empires when more efficient models and providers are now in place.

The bottom line: One way or another, we (taxpayers) pay for textbooks. Let’s do it more efficiently. Or, as David Wiley puts it, “If you buy one, you should get one.”

I also like seeing the different ways my amateur photography gets reused by others. For example, one of my photos of the Crab Cooker restaurant in Newport Beach, CA was reused on Wikipedia. Two other images were used on a travel site called Schmap.com. But my favorite reuse photo is one showing a row of three identical houses, all for sale in my old neighborhood in Redlands, California. It really captures the essence of housing crisis, and it has been reused in at least five different places.

Reuse & Reputation: Can they be tracked?

They say the more you give the more you get. While my photo sharing isn’t likely to generate anything more than a simple satisfaction of being appreciated, it has implications for reuse in other areas as well. Openness can pave the way for increased reputation in your profession just as easily as in your hobbies. But how do you know if you are making progress? Tracking reuse can be fairly simple if you have a fairly unique username. I have set up a Google Alert to crawl the web and notify me anytime my Flickr username (caswell_tom) pops up somewhere. Of course, this won’t track reuse in print or on password protected web pages, but it’s a start. As my collection grows I keep track by adding a “reused” tag to each of the photos (here is what I have so far). I also add a comment on my image with the URL where the photo was reused. Flickr makes adding tags and comments to your photos very easy.

Does greater openness = greater reuse?

I have learned that unique of obscure photos get reused far more than common ones. And while greater openness does not necessarily translate to greater reuse, I have noticed that people started reusing my photos around the same time I assigned an Attribution-only Creative Commons license to all my photos. It’s just anecdotal, but I didn’t not have any cases of reuse until I made the change from CC-BY-NC to CC-BY. It seems logical that a less restricted license would be more appealing to an online journal, magazine, or other site. Of course, adding metadata also helps. I usually add a few descriptive tags to my best photos. But just as important is my willingness to open up my CC license by only asking for attribution without adding a bunch of other conditions that make reusers nervous. The truth is, I really don’t care if people use my photos commercially. And the odds of them being used for something really offensive approaches zero.

I collect reuse like some people collect coins. I think it’s fun to see what happens with them. You never know where they might end up. If you have your own story of tracking reuse, please share!

UPDATE: I just found out that my friend, Julià Minguillón from Barcelona does the same thing! He posts all the places his photos have been reused to delicious, and he has over 160 cases of reuse. Wow!