Friday Freebies for your Blog: Embedding Videos from YouTube

By Tom Collins

Last week's post about the free widget for displaying photos from your Flickr or Picasa streams gave me an idea for sharing the blogging resources I come across all the time — and the hope that you'll join in and share, too! I'm pretty sure most everyone experiences the same "things I found while looking for something else" moments that I do.

Anyway, this week it's video from the granddaddy-of-them-all free resource: YouTube.

You've Got … Permission!

You may be thinking, wow, Tom, that's not exactly a revelation. But have you ever wondered what gives you (or YouTube, for that matter) the right to embed other peoples' work in your blog?

I did today, when Chloe asked me where she could find a copy of the video a group of us made about surviving Hurricane Irene at BlogPaws 2011 and I discovered there are (at least) four of them on YouTube:

 

 
The reason I can use these for free IS NOT "because they're on the internet" folks!

It's because YouTube's Terms of Service require users who upload videos to grant YouTube — and all of its users — a license to use them via the embed code that YouTube provides. For the masochists out there, the legalese about these "worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license[s]" can be read and deciphered in YouTube's Terms of Service, Paragraph 6.

If you can take it, paragraphs 4 ("General Use of the Service—Permissions and Restrictions" – with special exemptions in 4(E) for use by ad supported bloggers) and 5 ("Your Use of Content"), along with their FAQ entry on the limits of commercial usage, are worth thinking about, too.

But the short version is that you have permission to embed videos from YouTube.

What other sources do you like and use?