Apologies for the quiet around here lately - I've been completely emerged in a family health crisis. I hope to pick things up in the next few days. Meantime here's some suprising news (by way of BoingBoing) from Markus Weiland, who has compared the license agreements from the main video sharing sites. Netribution's (until now) prefered site Vimeo comes off the worst:
"By submitting your Submission to VIMEO, you hereby grant VIMEO [...] a worldwide, perpetual, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, sub-licensable (through multiple tiers) and transferable license (with a right to create derivative works) to use, copy, transmit or otherwise distribute, perform, modify, incorporate into other works, publicly perform and display your Submission or any portion thereof, in or through any medium, [...]. VIMEO shall be entitled to unrestricted use of any Submission for any purpose whatsoever, commercial or otherwise, without compensation to the submitter."
YouTube doesn't come off much better - only Blip.tv, which we were pushing in the last funding book - has a filmmaker friendly End User License Agreement (EULA) that lets the producer choose the license under which their content appears. DailyMotion, which has been premiering some great indie features recently, also gets a thumbs up. The full list is at the Advancing Usability blog.