Archiving Creative Commons and public-domain video
If you want to build a video archive without any rights ambiguity at all, there's more freely licensed material than most people realise.
- Archive.org, Wikimedia Commons and NASA are large, clean sources
- CC licences vary — read the suffix, not just the letters
- Save the licence details alongside the file
Where to look
Archive.org hosts an enormous public-domain film and video collection. Wikimedia Commons, NASA, and many government agencies publish freely reusable footage. YouTube also has a Creative Commons filter in its search tools.
Reading the licence
CC BY requires attribution. CC BY-SA additionally requires you to share derivatives under the same terms. CC BY-NC forbids commercial use. Public domain and CC0 carry no conditions at all.
Keep the provenance
Save the source URL, the licence name and the creator's name in a text file beside the video. If you ever publish anything using it, you'll need exactly that, and it's tedious to reconstruct later.
Why it's worth the discipline
An archive built from clearly licensed material can be shared, cited and published from without anyone having to ask permission after the fact.