Simply share OER on YouTube, Facebook & Co. — is that possible?

Why not pub­lish OER on pop­u­lar online plat­forms to achieve max­i­mum vis­i­bil­ity? As sim­ple as the upload is, the Cre­ative Com­mons license con­di­tions of OER con­tent are dif­fi­cult to rec­on­cile with the terms of use of the plat­form oper­a­tors. The fol­low­ing arti­cle brings some light into the dark­ness.

Before upload­ing con­tent to a plat­form, you must grant the plat­form oper­a­tor rights of use so that they can make the con­tent you have uploaded pub­licly acces­si­ble on the inter­net. In gen­eral, both the Cre­ative Com­mons licenses of OER con­tent and the license you grant to plat­forms such as YouTube or Face­book when upload­ing con­tent are non-exclu­sive. As the author, you can there­fore grant both the plat­form oper­a­tor and poten­tial users rights of use for your works.

If the grant­ing of rights in the plat­for­m’s terms of use pro­vides for the pos­si­bil­ity of sub­li­cens­ing, it is impor­tant that you are the orig­i­nal author of the con­tent you would like to upload. In this case, works by other authors may not be pub­lished — even if they are pro­vided with a Cre­ative Com­mons license. The rea­son for this is that Cre­ative Com­mons licenses do not allow re-licens­ing to third par­ties — as is the case with Face­book, for exam­ple. This would require the prior con­sent of the authors of the work.
The con­sent require­ment also applies to OER cre­ated by mul­ti­ple authors: In this case, each indi­vid­ual co-author must con­sent to the grant­ing of rights to the plat­form oper­a­tor.

You should always check the Cre­ative Com­mons license con­di­tions before upload­ing any con­tent: Con­tent marked “no com­mer­cial use” may not be pub­lished on many plat­forms. The sale of adver­tis­ing rep­re­sents a com­mer­cial busi­ness pur­pose of the plat­form, which is not com­pat­i­ble with the NC license con­di­tion.

License systems on the platforms, such as YouTube

The stan­dard YouTube license is aimed purely at the recep­tion of the video and excludes any fur­ther use in the sense of OER. Alter­na­tively, you also have the option of select­ing the Cre­ative Com­mons license CC BY 4.0 when upload­ing your con­tent to the plat­form. If you wish to use a Cre­ative Com­mons license other than this one, you can indi­cate this in the descrip­tion text of the video

In order to com­ply with the Cre­ative Com­mons license terms, the notice must be com­plete and cor­rect, i.e. con­tain the author, source and the license itself. In addi­tion, you should make it clear that the license notice must be adopted for any sub­se­quent use and must be placed there just as cor­rectly. Of course, you can also use the descrip­tion field to place fur­ther infor­ma­tion, such as a link to the project or con­tact details.
As there is no cor­re­spond­ing text field on Face­book, license notices must be included directly in the post.

Discrepancy between platform T&Cs and licensing

The CC BY 4.0 license per­mits the use of the video in whole or in part, as well as edit­ing. How­ever, the YouTube terms of use con­flict with these rights of use. Only link­ing in the form of fram­ing is per­mit­ted, whereby the YouTube player must remain intact. Down­load­ing the video to your own server for the pur­pose of mak­ing it avail­able on your own web­site is not per­mit­ted. The video can be shared via the clip func­tion, but edit­ing is not pos­si­ble.

This means that if you, as the author, do not enable con­tact in the video descrip­tion through which third par­ties can obtain the file they need to use the video under the Cre­ative Com­mons license, it is not pos­si­ble to use the video under the terms of the license. In terms of the license agree­ment, you as the author:in as the licensor:in thus vio­late the terms of the Cre­ative Com­mons license you have cho­sen your­self.

This prob­lem does not exist in this form on Face­book, as the OER mate­ri­als can be uploaded in the for­mat of your choice, e.g. as a PDF. It is also pos­si­ble to post a link to the OER mate­ri­als in an OER repos­i­tory and thus avoid the afore­men­tioned licens­ing prob­lems.