Any chance we can get them to make it available via archive.org as well? Yeah everyone loves Google, but archive.org seems like a vastly better home for content like this - preserving the historical record digitally, more easily allowing it to be downloaded and fairly used in video reports, classroom material, and so forth.

Does archive.org have the storage space or bandwidth to serve this much video?

I agree that archive.org is the "correct" place for this content, but I think YouTube is a more practical location for now (and also the place where I think the content is more likely to be discovered by regular people: many people think of searching YouTube when looking for video content of all types, and YouTube has a top-tier indexing and search engine to help them find the right stuff).

Probably

http://archive.org/stats/

Sure, they already hosted the Prelinger movie archives: https://archive.org/details/prelinger & https://archive.org/details/prelingerhomemovies

I think that AP is making some money from these videos by hosting them on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjZ6NNLCdio has ads in the right sidebar (one of the newly uploaded videos).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC82Il2cjqA does not have ads.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2467968

It seems most of the content is under "Standard YouTube Licence"[1]. Since this is historical footage I would have preferred if it was under Creative Commons, so that it could be included in other videos. Anyways, this makes YouTube even more useful for preserving and making notable videos more accessible.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms

You can license the clips by going to the AP Archive website; e.g., this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjZ6NNLCdio can be licensed from here: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/c0016a30f75d456abf... (the link was in the description on YouTube).

I assume they stuck with the Standard YouTube License because that lets them keep ownership of the videos and license them out separately under their own terms.

keep ownership of the videos and license them out separately under their own terms.

The one you link to they surely can't own? 1906 => public domain.

Copyright works in mysterious ways. They probably have copyright on the actual files as well as the product that they created when capturing the analog originals digitally.

Copyright requires creativity; just using a tool to convert from analog to digital and generate files doesn't grant copyright protection, AFAIK.

Intuitively, yes. But unfortunately that doesn't guarantee it to be the case from a legal perspective.

IIRC, US copyright law includes the ambiguous words "slavish copy" with reference to something that would not be copyrightable. For example, the Vatican sold copyright to the imagery that is the restoration of the Sistine chapel roof - self evidently a "slavish copy" by design! - to the company that paid for the restoration, so they could have exclusive rights to sell/license reproductions of this restored imagery. They've never taken anyone to court, (quite possibly because their case is wobbly), but they do assert their rights to this work and try to get people to buy licenses accordingly.

This is awesome and i only now begin to really grasp the importance of things like this. I recently showed some german post and pre WWII footage to my grandma on youtube and she was delighted about the ability to access that kind of rare footage on demand. I recorded her commentary while watching the videos which was super interesting. She remembered many small details of living in Berlin post-war that she probably wouldn't have otherwise. She is 87 now, so i plan to do this a couple more times and make a video that shows the footage with her commentary on it, just to be able to preserve some of her thoughts and feelings.

When does such material become public domain?

That depends on the age and location of the footage, and where the viewer is (it can be public domain in some countries, and not in others).

If it is in the public domain does this override the Standard Youtube Licence? I.e. can on legally download the video? Or does one still have to use the AP's webpage which seems to require sign up (and then I don't know what).

Wow, one of the videos already has 104k views (in 2 days). It's a video of a polar bear who got hold of a tourist at a zoo. Strange what goes viral.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JUr6LRqWYk