Sharing TED talks on Steemit

TED talks are great, and an excellent resource that should be shared, however as with all copyrighted material we must be careful how we use it.

In looking at the implications of using TED talks in my posts, in particular my previous post on Stress and Mental Health (which unfortunately was maliciously down voted by a flag spammer) I thought it would be useful to share my opinion on what is acceptable use.

Please Note that I am not in the legal profession and this is not a legal opinion or guidance, it is merely my musings on the matter.

So, first off I went to the TED talks usage policy here:
https://www.ted.com/about/our-organization/our-policies-terms/ted-talks-usage-policy

There you will find that TED is rather open to their content being shared and are distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives license.

“At TED, our goal is to spread ideas. We encourage the TED community, non-profit organizations, bloggers, companies news media, and the like to share TED Talks that are open for distribution, through social media, other platforms and public events. While sharing ideas openly is a big part of who we are, we do license our content under certain conditions listed below.”

“We encourage you to share TED Talks that are licensed for distribution under our Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives (or the CC BY – NC – ND 4.0 International) which means it may be shared by following a few requirements.”

Now at first it looked like the talks would need to have a license for “Commercial use” as we can make money from Steemit posts and Commercial cases is the first paragraph under the terms.

However continued reading brings us to the section “Embedding TED Talks on your blog or site:”. This states (My highlighting):

“Bloggers, news/information websites and nonprofits (by which we mean: registered 501(c)3 organizations in the United States, and the equivalent in all other countries), may share one or more TED Talks under a Creative Commons (CC) license, provided that they follow the rest of the guidelines on this page and sharing the TED Talks is not the central purpose of your site. This means that we expect the usage under Creative Commons to be one to share ideas, not to use TED Talks as the main content for your site, which provides revenue or other sources of income that relies on content we are providing. If you are interested in licensing TED Talks for other purposes, or for more regular usage, please contact us for more details.”

This appears to allow us to occasionally post TED talks to Steemit as long as in their words “not to use TED Talks as the main content for your site”. What constitutes main content or central purpose seems to be open to interpretation. In short, I read it as, you can post our videos on your blog which you make money from as long as you Don’t take the Piss.

OK, what other provisions do we have to meet to use TED talk content; well looking at the same usage policy page we have the following clear statements that I don’t think need any explanation:

“Video player: You must use the TED embeddable player.”
“Attribution: You must add a visible link back to TED.com”
“Running talks in their entirety: You may not edit TED Talks, or alter them in any way”

At this point I would be reasonable happy to post an occasional TED talk on Steemit, but now I am looking and to take a Belt and Braces approach I thought I would look at the Creative Commons license itself. This is linked from the TED usage policy:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

First off the easy stuff:

“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.”
“NoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.”

Seems to be pretty clear and matches what TED have said. Unfortunately this gave me pause for thought:

“NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.”

Which brought me back to questioning what is commercial use? Does making money from a blog post here an Steemit make it commercial use?

Luckily the Creative Commons provides an answer in their FAQ’s.
https://creativecommons.org/faq/#does-my-use-violate-the-noncommercial-clause-of-the-licenses

In short “If you are unsure, you should either contact the rights holder for clarification, or search for works that permit commercial uses.”

Well we have already looked at the rights holders opinion so this brings us back to “Don’t Take The Piss”

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Thanks for taking the time to read me rambling on, remember this is just my musings on the subject it is not legal guidance. If you have found this post useful please consider upvoting, resteeming and/or following me.

Also, I am currently being maliciously spam downvoted by a certain user. This is because I flagged a couple of his posts for both plagiarism as well as abusive and threatening behaviour.

Thanks