The problem has been that people assume that anything uploaded to the Internet is fair game – which is true, so long as you don’t care about artist intent, credit, or authorship.

Sometimes irony is hard to pick up on the web, but this isn't one of those cases. Cherrypicking part-sentences to create misunderstanding doesn't work when the full article is right above.

Why this is big news is that with inbuilt licenses, it will allow searching by license. One of the main reasons I use vimeo is that it allows people to download the original, high quality/resolution files of my work. Sure, you can write "this video is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike", but if people word their licenses differently, it'll be hard to find content under the license you're looking for.

Check Flickr's advanced search for an example of this. Vimeo will be adding search by license very soon, I am sure.

There was nothing to stop people in the past detailing whatever license they wish next to their content (unless you've automatically agreed something with Vimeo by signing up?).

The only thing now is that license details are now designed into the Vimeo website in a way I guess that looks nice.

I guess a positive thing is that content providers are now prompted by Vimeo to detail some license for their work, which is maybe good to help spread awareness. But really if you're serious about your work then you would have thought about the copyright issues already and come up with your own solution if you want to details a creative commons (or any other) license next to your works.

Sorry, what?

If you create something the work is automatically bound by copyright laws depending on your location.

Making available content on the Internet does not change this. If there are no license details next to your work then it is treated as normal by law.

Unless I have had it completely wrong in my head.

The point of Creative Commons, as I understood, was to benefit the user and not the artist. If you create something with intent to share, but do not detail any license for your work, then people downloading will be criminalised due to copyright law (even though it was the artist's intent). If you instead specify some other license (eg creative commons) then basically everything works exactly the same (content available, users download) except the user is not longer branded criminal.

great !!!

i am a beginning visualist and since my very first performance i didn't intend to just grab (and violate author's rights) bunch of cool content and use it. so i started with beeple's loops (CCL), later on i created my own by remixing.

i believe this is the best ethical way how to do things right. i believe copyright in these modern digital times is really prehistoric and cannot catch up.

Anything videos I download (freely available or ripped)are named by title_artist. Now I can go back and tag them according to their CCLs.

Cool news and I will love some stuff free for my experimental electronica and Dubstep sets…

I will love artist share me their beautyful textures and landscapes (with a little banner at downright corner or something like this!)

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