Skip to Main Content
We are working to upgrade the research experience by making ongoing improvements to our Research Guides.
You may encounter changes in the look and feel of the Research Guides website along with structural changes to our existing guides. If you have any questions or concerns about this process please let us know.

Images

Why Creative Commons for Videos?

Searching for videos that have Creative Commons licenses is a great way to find videos you can use in your classes. 

  • Follow Creative Commons license obligations regarding attribution, etc. 
  • Link to the video in your class LMS.
  • You are ready!

Searching for Creative Commons Videos

Instructions for looking for videos from three different sites, YouTube, Creative Commons (YouTube videos), and Vimeo:

YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/)    Also see: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797468?hl=en

  • If you want to find videos that do have a CC license, you need to look at several pieces of information (click on the video and scroll down the page. Click on “SHOW MORE” on the left side of the page beneath the video).
  • Look at Copyright Disclaimer issued for the particular video and again look for any information on Creative Commons license information. You probably will need to click on the link that follows the phrase “This video is licensed under Creative Commons:” https://creativecommons.org/licenses/……
  • This should show you the actual Creative Commons license for that particular video.

Creative Commons (https://search.creativecommons.org/)

  • One of the options is to look at YouTube videos. You can look for YouTube videos directly from the Creative Commons site (and probably the results would be the same as looking via YouTube).
  • Use the filter below the search box to initially indicate usage preferences.
  • Once you have entered your search query and gotten results, you can use the FILTER just above the results to designate your desired filters (see Features tab, then choose Creative Commons).
  • Follow the directions listed above for YouTube to look at the actual Creative Commons license for a particular video.

Vimeo (https://vimeo.com/)  Also see:  https://vimeo.com/creativecommons

  • Search all videos at the top right side of the page by using the search box.
  • When you see the results, use the filters on the left side of the page to refine your results.
  • You may need to click on “+ More Filters,” and scroll down the page, in order to see the choices for sorting results by a particular type of Creative Commons (CC) license. (You may need to click “More” in order to see all of the CC license options.
  • Since you filter by CC license type, you will NOT see any CC license information under the video.
  • Since you can only filter by one license type at a time, you may wish to do additional searches to retrieve filters for other Creative Commons license types.

Here's another method of doing a YouTube search. 

Last updated on Feb 12, 2024 1:17 PM