Only if the video is licensed Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) or the owner gave you permission. With CC BY you must credit the title, the creator, the link and the license, and say you edited it. The license settles copyright, not money: YouTube's reused-content policy can still block monetization, even with permission.
By default, every YouTube video is under the standard YouTube license, which does not let you re-upload clips of it. A creator can switch a video to Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY), and YouTube shows that in the description as a Creative Commons license line.
To find them, search YouTube, open the search filters and pick Creative Commons; YouTube's help page on license types points to the same filter. Then check the description of each result for the license line. YouTube does not allow the CC BY license on a video that has a Content ID claim.
YouTube's help page asks for the title, the creator, the source link and the license. The CC BY 4.0 license text adds one more condition people miss: you must indicate that you modified the material (section 3(a)(1)(B)). A short clip with captions is always a modification.
The license lets you meet these conditions "in any reasonable manner" (section 3(a)(2)), and a link to the source video page works well because that page shows the license itself. This is the format of the line ClipEmber adds to posts made from a CC BY source:
Credit: "<video title>" by <channel name> — <link to the video> (CC BY). Cut and captioned from the original.
YouTube's channel monetization policies have a separate rule for reused content: channels that repost material from elsewhere without adding meaningful original value. The policy page says it applies even if you have permission from the original creator, and it treats compilations of clips with little or no narrative as not monetizable, while clips used for critical review or with real commentary can qualify.
So a channel built only from CC BY clips can be fully legal and still be refused monetization. If YouTube ad revenue is the goal, plan for your own commentary, narration or editing that makes the clip clearly yours. On TikTok and Instagram the platform rules differ; read them for the platform you post to.
Most videos that look reusable are not. When we checked the licenses of the sources our users and our own accounts had clipped, only about half of the audited sources were really CC BY, and across the whole library the share is lower. We also found our own mistake: before the credit line was enforced on every publishing path, posts made from other people's videos went out from our accounts without any credit.
| Measured | Source | |
|---|---|---|
| Source videos in our library licensed CC BY | 146 of 400 (36.5%) | source_assets.license in the production database, 11 October 2026 |
| Audited sources that were really CC BY | 12 of 25 | YouTube Data API status.license for each source, 19 August 2026 |
| Posts published without a credit line before the fix | 30 | scheduled_posts audit, August 2026 (fixed in the poster, AP-REV-006) |
No. Without a Creative Commons line in the description, the video is under the standard YouTube license, and you need the owner's permission to re-upload any part of it.
No. Credit is a condition of the CC BY license, not a replacement for it. Crediting a video you have no license to use doesn't make the re-upload allowed.
It reads the license from YouTube when it downloads the source and adds the full credit line to posts made from a CC BY video; on TikTok it is prefilled in the caption you approve. It doesn't stop you from clipping a standard-license video; for those you need the owner's permission. This page is not legal advice.
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