Creative Commons

UAF CTL Staff Best practices, Teaching Tips


Even if you鈥檙e not familiar with Creative Commons, chances are you鈥檝e benefited from the licensing services they provide across the web to individuals and organizations like Google, flickr, and Wikipedia.

The Creative Commons Mission

Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization and according to its mission statement, Creative Commons 鈥渄evelops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation." What does that mean? Let鈥檚 say one day you notice someone reading a magazine and the back cover has an advertisement that features a picture of a duck that you yourself took over a year ago and posted to your flickr account. You鈥檙e both flattered and frustrate someone liked your picture enough to steal it, but you鈥檙e not getting any credit for it. This is one of ways CC can help you out.

Own that duck.

Licenses

Creative Commons can apply six different license types to your work鈥搘hether it鈥檚 a picture of a duck, a scientific article, a blog post, etc.鈥搕hat will show users across the Internet how they can or cannot share, modify, commodify, or in any other way use your work.

Look familiar? Every Teaching Tip, for example, is licensed under Creative Commons. This particular license 鈥渓ets others others remix, tweak, and build upon [our] work non-commercially, as long as they credit [us] and license their new creations under the identical terms." Creative Commons offers moreand less restrictive licenses.

Why Use Creative Commons?

 

You may well ask yourself, 鈥渨hy would I bother sharing my work anyway? Isn鈥檛 it automatically copyrighted the moment I produce it?" As accessibility becomes a growing consideration, more and more creators 鈥揳cademic and otherwise鈥揳re looking to find reliable ways toshare their work.  Beyond more altruistic motivation, a Creative Commons license on your work (like a blog post or photograph) encourages users to share your work (because they don鈥檛 have to fear copyright infringement) and to credit you (since that鈥檚 part of the CC licensing agreement).  The licensing process is also incredibly easy. Once you understand what license you want, it takes a few seconds to get an embed code that will accompany the work it represents anywhere you store it online.

Search

Creative Commons also offers a search service that, while neither definitive nor exhaustive, offers a helpful start into finding material you can use according to the CClicenses. You can also perform a Google search that will filter your results according to how they鈥檙e labeled forreuse. You can find the 鈥渇ilter by license" drop down menu under the advanced search options in Google.

Learn More

Find out more about Creative Commons at

Tags: creative commons