Where Can I Safely Use YouTube Videos?
I received an excellent question from jeni10 about the acceptable use of YouTube videos.
“How can you tell which ‘YouTube’ videos you’re allowed to use and which ones you’re not allowed to use?”
In a world where stolen content on the internet is rampant, figuring out what resources you can legally use is really important to protecting the integrity of your blog, website, or articles on a revenue sharing site like Infobarrel. It also is important to protecting your Adsense account.
There are three parts to a good answer about how YouTube videos can be used appropriately. YouTube TOS, Adsense (and other advertisers) TOS, and the rules of the site you are using.
YouTube TOS for Using Embedded Videos
By using the YouTube site you accept the YouTube Terms of Service located at http://www.youtube.com/t/terms. Few people read the TOS but if you do something wrong YouTube is going to be enforcing them against you. Here is excerpts of the section that deals with the use of embedded videos and a related FAQ post.
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4. General Use of the Service—Permissions and Restrictions
YouTube hereby grants you permission to access and use the Service as set forth in these Terms of Service, provided that:
- You agree not to distribute in any medium any part of the Service or the Content without YouTube’s prior written authorization, unless YouTube makes available the means for such distribution through functionality offered by the Service (such as the Embeddable Player).
- You agree not to alter or modify any part of the Service.
- You agree not to access Content through any technology or means other than the video playback pages of the Service itself, the Embeddable Player, or other explicitly authorized means YouTube may designate.
- You agree not to use the Servicefor any of the following commercial uses unless you obtain YouTube’s prior written approval:
- the sale of access to the Service;
- the sale of advertising, sponsorships, or promotions placed on or within the Service or Content; or
- the sale of advertising, sponsorships, or promotions on any page of an ad-enabled blog or website containing Content delivered via the Service, unless other material not obtained from YouTube appears on the same page and is of sufficient value to be the basis for such sales.
Prohibited commercial uses do not include:
- uploading an original video to YouTube, or maintaining an original channel on YouTube, to promote your business or artistic enterprise;
- ; or
- any use that YouTube expressly authorizes in writing.
(For more information about what constitutes a prohibited commercial use, see our FAQ.)
From the FAQs updated 10/09/2010
We’ve updated our Terms of Use to clarify what kinds of uses of the website and the YouTube Embeddable Player are permitted. We don’t want to discourage you from putting the occasional YouTube video in your blog to comment on it or show your readers a video that you like, even if you have general-purpose ads somewhere on your blog. We will, however, enforce our Terms of Use against, say, a website that does nothing more than aggregate a bunch of embedded YouTube videos and intentionally tries to generate ad revenue from them.
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From this we can safely conclude that we can use YouTube videos so long as we:
==> Only use videos that have the Share Functions like embed and link functions available (some do not allow embedding so these can not be used).
==> Place significant written or other content around the YouTube video(s) that provides ”sufficient value to be the basis for such (ad) sales”. In other words you need to be delivering value to the reader beyond just posting a bunch of YouTube content and putting ads around it.
These rules are clearly designed to encourage the sharing of YouTube content (which drives traffic to YouTube) while prohibiting people from setting up a video site that just scrapes Youtube videos and slaps ads around them.
Adsense TOS and the Use of YouTube Content
Like YouTube, Adsense is a Google product. It is critical to adhere to Adsense TOS and Adsense Policies because they will kill your account and they will never give it back.
There are two Adsense issues to consider:
“Publishers may not place AdSense code on pages with content that violates any of our content guidelines.” Some YouTube videos may run afoul of the content guidelines. For example you may not display or link to:
- violent content,
- excessive profanity,
- content regarding programs which compensate users for clicking ads or offers, performing searches, surfing websites or reading emails, or
- any other content that is illegal, promotes illegal activity or infringes on the legal rights of others
Also, “AdSense publishers may not display Google ads on webpages with content protected by copyright law unless they have the necessary legal rights to display that content. Please see our DMCA policy for more information.”
The last point is one way to fight back against people who steal your content and use Adsense on it. Report them to Google Adsense and poof goes their Adsense account and all the money they have made.
If you are complying with the YouTube rules above by placing sufficient non-YouTube sourced content around the videos you have the legal right to display the copyrighted content.
If you are using another ad network, be sure to check their TOS but generally as long as you are using the YouTube video within the YouTube TOS you should be ok.
Rules of the Site You are Using
Generally all revenue sharing or blog hosting sites require you to follow Adsense rules or some beefed up version of the Adsense TOS. Check the specifics in the rules before doing anything weird.
Conclusion
Using YouTube videos to enhance your blog posts, articles, and websites can be a very effective way to attract readers and hold their interest because video can be very engaging.
From a practical matter, in addition to the YouTube TOS restrictions, you need to put some good commentary or other text around the embedded video because otherwise the search engines have little to go on in classifying your webpage. Search engines can’t read a video, they just read the title, file name, tags, and text around the video.
Infobarrel has a very easy to use video module that allows members to add YouTube videos to their site. Here are examples of an articles I published over on Infobarrel that use YouTube videos:
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