14 DAY TRIAL // Vimeo has teamed up with Creative Commons and will introduce new licensing options for its users enabling them to share their works and make them freely available while still retaining most rights over them. Users will be able to choose from the regular Creative Commons options which allow others to distribute or build on the original work as long as they use a similar license, name their source, and don’t use it for commercial purposes and so on.
“Creative Commons licenses have been a highly desired feature by the Vimeo community. By offering this new feature, we help make it easy for creators to allow others to use their works while still maintaining their copyright," Dae Mellencamp, Vimeo’s general manager, said, according to The Telegraph.
Despite the common misconception, Creative Commons is actually a copyright license. The owner of the copyright only allows others to use the work within the confines of the license, but for all intents and purposes he or she is still the copyright holder.
Vimeo has always been a favorite place for budding film makers and the emphasis has always been on quality rather than quantity. And especially for those starting out, having access to quality videos that they can use in their work without having to worry about the copyright issues is crucial. The move doesn’t really have any downsides for Vimeo, it just allows its users to have more freedom over their works.
Videos that will be shared under a Creative Commons license will be clearly marked as such and others will be able to download the source files at their original quality. The new feature should go live later today. Next week, Vimeo will introduce the Global Setting feature which will enable users to modify various settings affecting a file like tags, a video’s info and so on. This will also give users the option to change the license for videos they have already uploaded.