Richard Byrne over at Free Tech for Teachers has been one of our biggest supporters in the edu-blogging world and was kind enough to highlight a few of our videos in a recent post called "Three Common Craft Videos That Should Be In Your Training Library." In this post, Richard states:
I like Common Craft videos for the clear simplicity of their presentations. For that reason I actually purchase copies of the videos to save on my hard drive. I encourage you to do the same if you use their videos for trainings.
Apparently, this post caused some of his readers to ask an important question: Why would I buy something I can use for free? It's a question we hear from time-to-time and I think that Richard's response was one that we really appreciate. In a follow-up post called Why Pay For a Free Video? He re-posts his answer from a previous post:
A couple of days ago I Tweeted that I was buying a copy of Common Craft's video Wikis in Plain English. The fact that I bought anything may come as a shock to some readers. After all, this is Free Technology for Teachers and you can watch all of the Common Craft videos for free at various places on the Internet. So why did I purchase Wikis in Plain English? I purchased a copy of it because I will be conducting some workshops over the next few months in which Wikis in Plain English will be useful. Since I will be getting paid for those workshops, using the free version of the Common Craft videos would not be right. Put another way, Lee and Sachi put a lot of their time and effort into the production of their videos, for me to profit from their work without paying for that work would be like stealing. Therefore, I bought a copy of Wikis in Plain English and will purchase other videos from Common Craft as needed. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people that haven't come to the same conclusion that I have and have abused the work of Lee and Sachi Lefever. Because of those abuses, the newest Common Craft video is not embeddable although you can still view it for free on Common Craft.
At the end of the day, we've made the choice to share less than half of our library on You Tube. In making that choice, we've left the decision up to the individual educator about how to proceed. Are happy for educators to use the YouTube versions, but we also want people to know that the videos we license do offer benefits that you won't find with YouTube. Just to name a couple, they are high resolution and look great on projector screens. Further, they don't have any ads or watermarks. They are designed for workshops and presentations and we work with schools on licensing all the time. Here's a case study.
We always appreciate educators who do choose to license videos from us, for whatever reason. It helps us keep making videos. We also understand that educators cannot always afford licensing and hope that the YouTube versions can be an option. In which case, we only ask that you help spread the word about our work and value it provides.
