Publishing recordings of semi-public video meetings

Here is some lay guidance on the recording and making available of semi‑public video meetings. My comments are based on my experiences recording and publishing three mini‑workshops for the Open Energy Modelling Initiative (openmod) using YouTube:

• https://forum.openmod-initiative.org/tags/mini-workshop-2020
• https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1KZW5drgvf22j8EqHxKLzw

The openmod required that:

• presenters consent to their recording being CC‑BY‑4.0
• that an open license on the slides was optional but preferred (about half complied)
• that questioners who did not consent to being recorded would be edited out before release

Before delving into specifics, some general observations as I understand things:

• the law allowing the photographing and filming of copyrighted material that is incidental does not apply
• the GDPR provides for the processing of personal information to fulfill a contract and insofar that a Creative Commons license can be considered a contract, the CC‑BY‑4.0 trumps default GDPR protections including the right to revoke consent
• the law on webinars is unclear, these being relatively recent and not (yet) subject to case law

In which case, I recommend obtaining upfront explicit consent to publish the video under CC‑BY‑4.0 when collecting registrations, as follows (the example depicts Zoom):

The question of whether that license equally applies to the screen shared slides was not one I traversed nor needed to resolve.

On a technical point, check your platform recording preferences carefully. Zoom offers a setting to output a video format friendly to third‑party editors, for example.

Finally, handling the consent and metadata issues for the openmod series took 80% of the time. Editing the actual video was trivial in comparison. Indeed I resorted to CSV, pandas, wkhtmltopdf, and exiftool and wrote more way more python than I ever intended.