Can I modify the YouTube licenses in order to make a YouTube video about SO Content? I would like to create a YouTube video about content from StackOverflow. The licenses of SO do not seem to be compatible with the two licenses offered by YouTube as described in an answer here. The same answer also indicates that it might be possible to modify the licenses offered by YouTube by simply putting the desired license into the description. Am I really allowed to modify the offered licenses by YouTube to my liking? If yes, on what basis?
TL;DR: Technically, the SO and YouTube licenses are (probably) incompatible, so if you want to use copyrightable elements from SO in a YouTube video, you'll have to get permission from the original author. Certainly it never hurts to ask, even if you might not strictly need it. You cannot change the YouTube license… When you upload a video to YouTube, you have to choose between one of (currently) two licensing options: &quot;Standard YouTube Licence&quot; and &quot;Creative Commons – Attribution&quot;. Neither of those licenses is exclusive, so you're certainly allowed to also license your video (to YouTube and/or anyone else) under some other terms. (That's what the answer you linked to means by &quot;[stating] a license in your video description&quot;.) But even if you do so, your original license grant to YouTube still applies in addition to the other license. You can't just turn around and say that haha, no, you were just kidding, it actually doesn't. (And if you try to do that, and actually get someone at YouTube to notice, their most likely response is to simply take your video down. They're a huge company with millions of uploaded videos — they're not going to care about just one video, or even one channel, at least if it doesn't happen to be one of the handful of their most popular ones.) …and you must license derivative works of Stack Overflow content under CC BY-SA (not CC BY!) According to the Stack Overflow Terms of Service, &quot;subscriber content&quot; on SO (and other Stack Exchange sites, including this one) is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA, version 2.5, 3.0 or 4.0 depending on when the content was posted). The &quot;human-readable summary&quot; of this license, as shown on the linked page above, says (emphasis mine): You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. Under the following terms: Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Note that this is not the same license as the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (CC BY) offered as one of YouTube's licensing options. In particular, the CC BY-SA licenses include the &quot;viral&quot; ShareAlike condition, which requires any derivative works based on the licensed work to also be licensed under the same CC BY-SA license (or one of a handful of designated &quot;compatible licenses&quot;). So if you e.g. make a derivative video based on a CC BY-SA license Stack Overflow post, you must also license your video as CC BY-SA in order to be allowed to distribute it at all. …and you (probably) can't just dual-license your video to YouTube either In principle, there's an option that might be allowed under the terms of CC BY-SA, and would at least seem to follow the spirit of the license: Upload your video to YouTube normally, selecting &quot;Standard YouTube Licence&quot;. Also license your video to the public under CC BY-SA 4.0, e.g. by stating so in the video description or in the video itself. The idea is that, by explicitly releasing your derivative video to the general public under CC BY-SA, you've followed the requirements of the ShareAlike clause of the original Stack Overflow content's license (with some possible caveats regarding downloadability — see below). The remaining question, then, is whether you're allowed to also license the video YouTube itself under their standard license. And this, in turn, effectively boils down to the following question: Does the standard YouTube license allow YouTube to do something with your video that CC BY-SA doesn't already allow them to do anyway? If it doesn't, then the YouTube license grant is redundant: you're just telling YouTube &quot;sure, I give you permission to do all these things that you already can do under CC BY-SA.&quot; If it does, however, then it's likely that you are not legally allowed to grant YouTube such permission to use your video, since it's (presumably) a derivative work of SO content it's based on, and thus may not be legally distributed without the original copyright holder's permission (which you and YouTube, again presumably, only have in the form of the CC BY-SA license). The tricky part here is finding out exactly what the &quot;standard YouTube license&quot; actually says. As far as I can tell, the actual terms of that license are buried in YouTube's Terms of Service, and basically say the following (plus some other stuff regarding monetization and content deletion that do not seem relevant here; emphasis again mine): Licence to YouTube By providing Content to the Service, you grant to YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable licence to use that Content (including to reproduce, distribute, modify, display and perform it) for the purpose of operating, promoting, and improving the Service. Licence to Other Users You also grant each other user of the Service a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to access your Content through the Service, and to use that Content (including to reproduce, distribute, modify, display, and perform it) only as enabled by a feature of the Service. As far as I can tell (and keeping in mind that I am not a lawyer), the &quot;licence to other users&quot; is innocuous — it's just a subset of the rights already granted by CC BY-SA. (And none of these license grants are exclusive, so they don't prevent you from also granting a more permissive alternative license, such as CC BY-SA.) Most of the &quot;license to YouTube&quot; also looks fine to me, insofar as it basically just allows YouTube to distribute the video on your behalf, which, again, CC By-SA already allows anyway. Mere mechanical modification of the the video for display purposes (such as downscaling it to a lower resolution, adjusting the playback speed, etc.) also does not seem particularly problematic to me, as such mechanical changes are generally not sufficient to create a new copyright, and thus your CC BY-SA license grant should extend to such mechanically modified versions as well. However, there are a couple of terms in the license, which I've highlighted in bold above, that may be read as allowing YouTube to create further derivative works of your video (and thus, potentially, of the SO content it is based on) e.g. for promotional purposes, and to release these derivative works under a license other than CC BY-SA. That would be a violation of the ShareAlike clause, and thus something that you may not give YouTube permission to do on behalf of the original SO content creator. Would YouTube actually do that with your video? Most likely not. Could they? Under that license, yes they could. Also, there's a potential issue with the clause in CC BY-SA 4.0 that says (in section 3(b)(3)): You may not offer or impose any additional or different terms or conditions on, or apply any Effective Technological Measures to, Adapted Material that restrict exercise of the rights granted under the Adapter's License You apply. The problem here is that YouTube does not normally permit downloading videos, and has been known to send DMCA takedown requests against software projects such as youtube-dl that attempt to circumvent this restriction. As such, only distributing your video on YouTube could be interpreted as an attempt to prevent viewers of the video from exercising their right under CC BY-SA to download, redistribute and create derivative works of it. Also, even if you e.g. included an alternative download link in your YouTube video description, that might not be sufficient to make you compliant with CC BY-SA, since you would still have granted YouTube a license to display and redistribute your video as they want, including in contexts that do not include your download link. …but your video might not be a derivative work in the first place However, all is still not lost, and in practice you might well be able to legally create a YouTube video based on a Stack Overflow post anyway. The first, obvious, question is whether your video even counts as a derivative work in the first place. Ideas cannot be copyrighted, and if all you're taking from the SO post is the idea, while not copying any specific phrasing choices or images or code, then your video won't be a derivative work under copyright law, and as such, you won't be bound by the restrictions of the CC BY-SA license. Also, even including e.g. small snippets of code may be permitted without turning your video into a derivative work, if either the pieces are simple and generic enough not to meet the threshold of originality required for copyright protection, or if your use of them in your video is permitted under fair use (US), fair dealing (UK and commonwealth) or similar legal doctrines in your local jurisdiction. In such a case, you're legally allowed to use them in your video without availing yourself of the permissions granted by the CC BY-SA license, and thus also without being bound by the restrictions included in that license. The tricky bit here is that the boundaries of copyrightable originality and fair use are notoriously blurry and vary between jurisdictions, and it's very hard to be sure on which side of them your use falls on without an expensive and uncertain legal process. When in any doubt, I would thus recommend not relying on them too much, at least not if your use is such that you could possibly imagine someone wanting to sue you over it. By the way, one of my own answers on Physics Stack Exchange was actually turned into a YouTube video by the &quot;It's Okay To Be Smart&quot; channel a couple of your ago. What they did was exactly this: while they followed the style and structure of the answer quite closely in many respects, they took care to rephrase everything in their own words and to recreate all the demonstrations and diagrams. Is their video legally a derivative work of my answer? Maybe, marginally — some of their diagrams look very similar to mine, and some of the similarities just might be distinctive and original enough to be copyrightable. But even if I wanted to sue them, this would be a tough argument to make and the outcome would by no means be certain. I do wish they'd at least included my name and a backlink, though. :/ …or the author of the original SO post might have multilicensed it Even if your video is a derivative work of an SO post, you might still be able to use content from the post in it without relying on the CC BY-SA license. In particular, the same content might also be available under another, less restrictive license that you can choose to follow instead. In some cases, the post your quoting might directly include an alternative license notice e.g. as part of a code snippet, making that snippet (or whatever the extra license notice applies to) dual-licensed. The code, images or text that you want to use may have been published elsewhere under a different license by its author. For example, you might find a copy of it on one of the author's GitHub repositories (example), or it might have been reposted on the author's blog. Or, in the case of code, it might actually come from an open source project available under a permissive license (example). (BTW, both of the linked examples above are also examples of code with explicit license notices on SO). In the absence of an explicit link in the post, Google can be your friend here. Just make sure that any versions with a different claimed license really are licensed by the author and not just unauthorized third-party copies. Some Stack Overflow users, such as myself, include a general dual-licensing statement on their user profile. Mine, for example, currently looks like this: Please consider any (original) code I post to Stack Overflow and other Stack Exchange sites to be released under CC-Zero unless stated otherwise. You may do whatever you want with it and don't have to credit me in any way, although of course that would be nice. In addition, to avoid ambiguity regarding the open source status of CC-Zero, you may also use, copy, modify, and/or distribute any original code I have posted on any Stack Exchange sites under the terms of the ISC license or any other OSI approved open source license, unless explicitly stated otherwise. If doing so, please use the copyright statement &quot;Copyright &lt;year of posting&gt; Ilmari Karonen&quot; if no other copyright statement is provided. (Disclaimer: the statement above has been written by me for my own use, and has not been reviewed by a lawyer in any jurisdiction. If you like it, you have my permission to adopt it verbatim or paraphrased for your own use, but I make absolutely no warranties regarding its legal effect or validity.) …or you could just ask for their permission Obviously, this is always an option, assuming that you can contact the author. One simple way to do that is to post a comment on the post you want to reuse, asking for explicit permission to use it in your video and/or for an alternative license with more permissive terms. Of course, it's up to the author whether or not they want to grant such permission. At a minimum, something like the following additional permission should be sufficient (noting, again, that I am not a lawyer and that the text below has not been reviewed by one): In addition to the permissions granted by the CC BY-SA 4.0 license (and incorporating the definitions therein), You may upload Adapted Material based on this Licensed Material to third-party content sharing sites such as YouTube, and in doing so grant such sites an additional separate license to the Adapted Material and any Licensed Material contained therein, as required by their Terms of Service, provided that: You follow the License Conditions of the CC BY-SA 4.0 license (including the requirements to license the Adapted Material under CC BY-SA 4.0 or a BY-SA Compatible License, and to indicate this to recipients in a reasonable manner), and You make a reasonable effort (e.g. by providing an alternative download link, if the content sharing site does not provide one by default) to allow recipients of the Adapted Material to download it in a manner and format that allows them to easily exercise their Licensed Rights to it. or, in non-legalese: Yeah, sure, you can make a YouTube video based on my SO post, as long as you license it under CC By-SA and include a download link in the video description. …and they might not care enough to sue you, anyway All things considered, it's extremely unlikely that anyone would bother to spend the time and money to actually sue you over a video based on a Stack Overflow post. At worst, if they really didn't like what you did, they might decide to send YouTube a takedown request for your video, since that's a relatively simple process. At that point, assuming that YouTube acts on the request and takes your video down, you basically have three options: cut your losses, let the video stay deleted and hopefully be more careful next time, contact the author of the source material and try to come to a mutually acceptable agreement with them (which, of course, you should ideally have done before posting the video), or if you really believe that your use of the SO content was not a copyright violation, you can submit a counter-notice to YouTube (who will forward it to the original claimant, who will then &quot;need to respond with evidence that they’ve taken legal action to keep the content from being restored to YouTube&quot; within 10 days). Of course, ideally you wouldn't ever let things get that far in the first place. And the way to do that is to follow the advice above, and specifically to: not reuse copyrightable content when you can easily avoid it, but instead express your ideas in your own words, and with your own pictures and code; when you do want to reuse content created by someone else, ask their permission if possible; when basing your work on freely licensed content such as SO posts, try to follow the spirit of the license as far as possible, even if you cannot technically follow it to the letter; in any case, always give credit where it's due, both for (potentially copyrightable) content and for (non-copyrightable) ideas and inspiration; and generally try to be nice to people whose knowledge, creativity and hard work you're building on. Of course, following this advice won't prevent someone from suing you for copyright violation (although it might in some cases reduce their chances of prevailing, and/or the damages they can successfully claim if they do). But it makes it less likely that they'll want to.
Let's examine some laws that may apply to your case Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) There are criminal penalties for willful infringement for personal financial gain. If you are only sending it to one family member through a private communication (eg not posting it publicly) and not selling it and one copy of the music video has a retail value of $1,000 or less then there will be no criminal penalties. But you may be liable for civil penalties. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) Courts have ruled that ToS violations do not constitute unauthorized access (or exceeding access) so you aren't in violation of the CFAA Civil Liability By downloading a video off of YouTube you are in violation of their ToS. There isn't enough prior case law for me to tell you the outcome here. You may be committing some sort of civil wrong by the act of downloading. In addition, you are distributing a copyrighted work without permission which would open you to more civil penalties. The real question is how likely is it for this to be enforced? Not likely.
Their code, their rules A copyright holder is free to offer their work under none, one or many licences. They can, at the same time, use their own work however they see fit without regard to the licences they have given/sold to others (except, they can only give one person an exclusive licence). As an analogy, let’s say I own a fleet of cars. I can drive my cars anytime I want. I can let Jim drive my cars anytime he wants for free. I can let Mary drive a specific car on Thursdays and only within 10km of the depot. I can let Joe drive my cars providing he pays me $50 a day. And I’m not going to let Fred drive them at all because Fred’s a jerk. Each of those is a different licence.
It's hard to say, under the Twitter TOS. They do not claim that copyright is transferred to them: &quot;You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. What’s yours is yours — you own your Content (and your photos and videos are part of the Content)&quot;. But you do license the content: By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed). This license authorizes us to make your Content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same. You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to provide, promote, and improve the Services and to make Content submitted to or through the Services available to other companies, organizations or individuals for the syndication, broadcast, distribution, promotion or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use. Such additional uses by Twitter, or other companies, organizations or individuals, may be made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services. The totality of conditions, including the Twitter Rules, is ever-evolving and not apparently contained in a single link. From what I can tell, there is no condition that prohibits a user from copying tweets into a book. There are numerous statements about &quot;respecting copyright&quot; which refer to taking material that is not licensed to Twitter and redistributing: nothing about redistributing licensed material.A plain reading of the first bold sentence says that you can make your content available to the world, not restricted to &quot;retweeting&quot;.
No If YT#1 gets a license from artist A, that permits YT#1 to do whatever copying and reuse is stated in the license. It might be narrow or very broad. Usually such a license will only grant permission to the person who asked. Unless the license also grants permission to YT#2, or to some broader group which includes YT#2, YT#2 cannot claim any rights under such a license. Assuming that the license does not include him or her, YT#2 has the same rights as any member of the public would, but no more. In general, pitch raising a piece of music is a way of creating a derivative work. In the US, under 17 USC 106 one needs permission from the copyright owner to create a derivative work. Otherwise doing so is copyright infringement. The laws of other countries, and the Berne Copyright Convention have similar provisions on this point. Creating a derivative work requires permission in all countries that I know about. &quot;Piggybacking&quot; is not a thing in copyright law. A copyright owner can give permission (usually called a license) to any person or group of persons that the owner pleases. The permission does not extend to anyone else. This is true in all countries. I should be clear that YT#2 needs permission from both YT#1, and from A. The way the question is worded I have been assuming that YT#2 had permission from YT#1, but a comment from grovkin made it clear that I needed to be more explicit about this. It is possible for a license to permit a person to pass on the license to others. For example, all CC licenses and all copyleft and most open source licenses do this, and others could. But the license must explicitly grant such permission. The one way in which a person might create a derivative work without permission and without it being infringement is if an exception to copyright applies. In the US the main exception to copyright is fair use. See Is this copyright infringement? Is it fair use? What if I don&#39;t make any money off it? for more detail on fair use. Fair use decisions are made on a case by case basis, and generally depend on the detailed facts of the ase. But based on the limited info in the question, this would not qualify. It seems to use the whole piece of music, which tends to weigh against fair use. The new work does not seem to be transformative, that is, it seems to serve the same general purpose as the original. The new work might harm the economic value of the original, or might if many people did this. The original is creative, not factual. All of those weigh against fair use. Different countries have very different exceptions to copyright, and I do not know all of them. But the use described in the question does not seem to fit any that I know of. In any case, an exception to copyright applies to anyone, and does not depend on another person's license. It is thus never a form of &quot;piggybacking&quot;. By the way, the question describes pitch raising ads &quot;illegal&quot;. Making an unauthorized derivative work gives the copyright owner grounds to sue. If the owner does sue, and wins, s/he might be awarded money damages, and the court might issue an injunction ordering the infringer not to infringe again. But it would not normally be treated as a crime, and law enforcement would not be involved. In the US, only bulk copyright infringement, carried out as a business, is usually prosecuted (for example a factory churning out unauthorized music CDs).
What would be the legal validity of this behaviour? Your changes to the browser source of the website contract or license of Terms of Service (TOS) - essentially a "click-wrap" license - before agreeing to it means nothing in a legal sense, other than to void the contract. The other party (the website) can't possibly agree to those contract changes without them being submitted as contractual changes and agreeing to them, if they did agree to them. That's basic contract law. That website TOS probably has a clause that says that if you don't agree to the TOS in full, as written, without modifications, you can't use the website. And the TOS may also say that they reserve the right to prevent you from using the site by closing your account or even blocking your access. Your "witness" to the contract changes is meaningless, as your witness is not a party to the contract. And any witness to the fact that you have changed the terms of the TOS before agreeing to it would work against you in a civil proceeding as proof of your attempt at modifying the contract.
Yes, you can. To be precise, I claim that one can take BSD-licensed code and distribute it under the combined terms of both the BSD and the GPL licences. We know that, if I receive someone else's code under a BSD licence, I may redistribute it to you under those same terms. This is common practice, and not (I hope) in any way contentious. We also know that I may not redistribute it to you without the conditions that the BSD licence imposes; that is, I may not place less onerous conditions on you than BSD requires (that is, requiring the inclusion of the original copyright notice, the disclaimer, this list of conditions, and a prohibition on claiming the original author's endorsement on any modified version). So the question becomes whether I can distribute that code whilst adding more onerous terms than the BSD licence itself imposes. It is clear that I can. As the question notes, Microsoft is known to have taken code which it received under a BSD licence and used it in proprietary products. These come with very onerous conditions on the the use, modification, and redistribution of the derived code (usually, they permit one instance of it to be run, and no modifications nor redistributions of any kind). For clarity: if I were to seek from Microsoft permission to modify and/or redistribute the derived code, and they were to grant it, they would not be able to free me from the BSD requirements as they applied to the derived code; I would still need to comply with those. But they are perfectly capable of applying new, onerous requirements of their own. The GPL imposes conditions on redistribution that are more onerous than BSD's, but less onerous than those of most proprietary licences. I am therefore perfectly entitled to receive code under a BSD licence, and - with or without making modifications of my own - redistribute it, adding in the GPL's requirements, if I choose to. If I haven't modified the code, those added requirements are probably pointless; if you don't wish to be bound by them, you will go and get the code from the original author, who presumably will happily distribute it to you under the BSD licence. But if I have modified the code, and you wish to use those modifications, then you will need to abide by the requirements of both the BSD and the GPL licences, since both will apply to this new, combined work (the original code + my changes).
They certainly can make that a license term and revoke the license if you do not comply. However, revoking the license is all they can do to &quot;forbid&quot;. Or they could sue you for damages without revoking the license. That said, you are free to consult how to use their software so long as you do not hold a license so that you are not bound by the terms AND you do not break the law e.g. copyright. How to do it is up to you to figure. Maybe you could simply consult users that do have a license — on their premises and devices.