Say I have a car dealership with a website.
Is there any legal or YouTube usage issues in creating a YouTube profile and uploading videos of cars for sale, and putting car, dealership and website info/links in the video descriptions?
And does the same thing apply to Facebook and Vimeo?
It is completely fine to upload videos to YouTube for commercial purposes, with links to your site, etc. From the YouTube TOS: http://www.youtube.com/t/terms
Prohibited commercial uses do not include:
- uploading an original video to YouTube, or maintaining an original channel on YouTube, to promote your business or artistic enterprise; - showing YouTube videos through the Embeddable Player on an ad-enabled blog or website, subject to the advertising restrictions set forth above in Section 4.D; - or any use that YouTube expressly authorizes in writing.
And given this: http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=71011&hl=en-US, it appears to be fine even to embed those videos for commercial (non-ad) usage.
We've updated our Terms of Use to clarify what kinds of uses of the website and the YouTube Embeddable Player are permitted.
We don't want to discourage you from putting the occasional YouTube video in your blog to comment on it or show your readers a video that you like, even if you have general-purpose ads somewhere on your blog.
We will, however, enforce our Terms of Use against, say, a website that does nothing more than aggregate a bunch of embedded YouTube videos and intentionally tries to generate ad revenue from them.
Vimeo however appears to be a different story:
Vimeo is intended for non-commercial use. By using the Site, you agree to abide by these Terms of Service.
Facebook I believe is fine, as many of the largest brands in the world use it for promotion, such as Coca Cola and Pepsi - so I think yours would be fine.
Hope this helps.
