What you need to know before embedding YouTube videos on your website

Just like sharing veterinary videos on your social channels, sharing a veterinary video on your practice website is a great way to help attract more visitors and turn more of those visitors into clients. 

• Video attracts 300% more website traffic 

• Video doubles the time visitors spend on a website. 

• Video increases website page views by 63%. 

To help put such numbers to work for your practice, all LifeLearn WebDVM websites include the ability to display and play videos from external sites like YouTube, and to alleviate any misinformation you may have heard, you can safely post someone else’s YouTube videos on your website (veterinary videos and otherwise), provided you know and follow a few things. 

Usage Granted by Embed Codes When Using YouTube Veterinary Videos 

According to YouTube’s Terms of Service (which applies to all users, including content providers), YouTube grants permission to access and use the site for veterinary videos or any type of video, provided you use the embeddable YouTube player feature that YouTube provides and agree not to distribute any part of YouTube’s service or content in any medium without YouTube’s prior written permission. 

Said another way that’s relevant to veterinary videos for practice websites: When anyone uploads a video to YouTube, the person enters into a royalty-free licensing agreement with YouTube that grants certain public usage rights, depending on how a creator enables a video: 

• If a video creator leaves the embed functionality enabled for a video, that person has agreed to allow other people to share that video on other mediums (including websites) without YouTube’s prior written permission according to YouTube’s Terms of Service. 

• If a video creator, on the other hand, disables embed functionality for a video, that person does not grant public use of a video, and per YouTube’s Terms of Service, anyone wishing to share that video on any medium would require prior written permission from YouTube. 

To sort which veterinary videos you can use, simply click a video’s Share button to see whether the embed functionality has been enabled.  

• If the embed option is available, the video owner has allowed embedding. 

• If the embed code is not visible, you cannot legally embed the veterinary video. 

After that, YouTube still has a few more usage conditions: 

• You agree not to access YouTube content through any other technology or means, other than a video’s embed code, the video playback pages of YouTube, or any other authorized means that YouTube may designate. 

• You agree not to modify, build on, or impair any of the embed functionality, including the links back to the YouTube website. 

• You can’t block or modify video ads. The YouTube player handles them automatically. 

• Embedding veterinary videos doesn’t override geographic, age, or restricted content policies set by YouTube. 

Copyright Restrictions and Veterinary Videos 

While YouTube grants certain public usage of videos through its Terms of Service, YouTube acknowledges and supports copyright ownership by video creators. 

Falling under Intellectual Property Rights, copyright is a legal right existing the U.S. and Canada (and other countries around the world) that grants exclusive rights to the creator of an original work, including the conditions under which a work may be used. While veterinary video creators (and all video creators) relinquish certain usage rights after uploading a video to YouTube, veterinary video creators remain the owners of their work. As such, video creators retain economic rights (the right to sell their work, either outright or in residual fashion such as paid access through streaming) and moral rights. 

Moral Rights 

Also known as authorship rights, moral rights comprise a creator’s rights to three things: 

1. The Right of Credit or Association guarantees all video creators receive authorship credit in any future presentation of their work. 
2. The Right of Integrity guarantees a video creator’s work shall fundamentally remain in the same state in which it was created. The right further guarantees that a creator can stop a work from being distorted, mutilated, modified or used in association with a product, service, cause or institution while also guaranteeing a creator’s right to change a work at any point. 
3. The Right of Anonymity or Context guarantees a video creator can decide how a work is used—even if the creator is not the copyright holder. 

Moral rights stand independent of copyright and remain with the creator of a video even after the transfer of copyright. The rights cannot be divested, sold, licensed or given away by a third party to whom an author may have sold or given away copyright ownership, and the rights last for the duration of copyright: 

• In Canada, copyright lasts for the lifetime of a creator, plus 50 years. 

• In the U.S., copyright lasts for the lifetime of a creator, plus 70 years. 

Related Videos and Veterinary Videos 

If you watch veterinary videos on YouTube (or any videos), you’re likely familiar with how YouTube displays related videos (or, “suggested videos”) at the conclusion of any video. Prior to September 2018, website owners could disable this YouTube function in the interests of avoiding videos that may not be in keeping with brand message and/or image. After September 2018, YouTube changed their embed code. So, it’s no longer possible to fully disable related videos. 

In summary, here are the guidelines for finding and displaying someone else’s YouTube veterinary videos on your WebDVM website to help attract more visitors: 

• Find a veterinary video you like on YouTube, then click the Share button to see whether the embed functionality has been enabled. 

• Do not alter the embed code when displaying veterinary videos on your practice website. 

• Show the video non-commercially. 

• Credit the creator of the veterinary video. 

• Do not edit or otherwise change the video. 

• Should a veterinary video creator contact you and ask you to remove a video from your website, do so immediately. 

• Monitor what related videos appear after a veterinary video plays to ensure recommended videos are in keeping with your practice image and message. 

For more about LifeLearn WebDVM websites and their full range of features, including the client education resource ClientEd (now with the AI-powered chat tool Ask Eddie), contact LifeLearn today for a free consultation and WebDVM demo. 

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