There are plenty of ridiculous videos on YouTube,
in fact, it is hard to find a non-ridiculous video
on YouTube, but they exist. Ridiculous or not,
professors may want to embed YouTube (or other, like VideoJug
and ExpertVillage) videos
on their web sites or within Blackboard. Read
on to find out how.
First, do you really want to embed, that is,
place the video window on your web page, or do you
want to link. To link, simply make a normal
hyperlink using FrontPage, SharePoint Designer,
Dreamweaver, or the Blackboard External Link tool
(if you want a stand alone item) or the Blackboard
visual text editor (if you want to link inline with
other text). Linking is preferable when you
don't want to give up a lot of page real estate for
the large YouTube video window, or when you are
sending an email and your users' mail clients are
liable to block scripted contents.
If you really want to embed, however, you have to insert some HTML
code directly into your web page or Blackboard
content item. Here is how to do it.
First, get the embed code from YouTube.
Each YouTube video is accompanied by a URL for
linking (see above), and Embed code for embedding.
Copy the Embed code to the clipboard by selecting
it (a simple click on the code will do it),
right-clicking (Mac control-click) and choose Copy.
Now open the web page you want to embed the video
window on.
Using FrontPage or SharePoint Designer on a standard web page, choose
Insert > Web Component... > Advanced Controls > HTLM
When the HTML Markup box opens, paste in the
embed code you copied from YouTube and click OK.
Now save the page (all you will see visually on the
page is a little yellow box with a question mark in
it:
.
Now, save the page and preview it to be sure it
works.
In the Blackboard Visual Text Editor type
whatever prefatory text you wish, then click the
HTML control:
Click the HTML control again to return to visual
text edit mode. Now click Submit, then test
the video within Blackboard to be sure it plays
correctly.
Copyright Issues
Could there be copyright problems with doing
this? According to the EFF (Electronic
Frontier Foundation) "...where inline links [the
embed code illustrated above is an inline link] are
concerned, there is absolutely no direct copyright
infringement liability" (see the
entire article for details). It is
possible there could be something called
"contributory infringement," ("a kind of 'aiding and
abetting' liability") but to qualify for this you
must a) link to a video that you know is infringing
and b) your link materially contributes to the
infringement. The EFF article gives two rules
of thumb for avoiding even this peripheral copyright
danger: "(1) don't embed videos that are
obviously infringing, and (2) consider removing
embedded videos once you've been notified by a
copyright owner that they are infringing."
In summary, copyright infringement even on a
public web site is extremely unlikely, especially if
you are reasonably certain the video is not
infringing in the first place, but even if this is
in question, you can avoid any sort of liability if
you remove the video once you receive a takedown
notice. After all, you are protected by the
same laws that protect Google and Yahoo when they
link to content. In an academic environment,
there are further protections if the video is being
used to educate. First, a fair use argument
could be made. Secondly, if the video is being
used for distance education, the TEACH Act can be
applied, provided the video was placed in
Blackboard.
Click here [PDF] for the excellent fair use
worksheet, and here for the equally excellent
TEACH Act check list, both from North Carolina
State University.
How
to Embed a YouTube Video
