The Creative Commons licensing system (which provides copyright holders the opportunity to distribute and share their work) has been getting quite of bit of press lately, with the WhiteHouse.gov website recently providing Creative Commons support for third party materials as well as the possibility now open for Wikipedia to switch to a Creative Commons license.
In a later post (today or tomorrow) we’ll discuss these news items more in-depth and will explain how AboutUs uses and views it’s free licensing as it applies to the wiki value of AssumeGoodFaith.
In the meantime though, it makes sense to better explain how Creative Commons works for it’s “copyleft” ability to designate what rights others have to use, disseminate and/or modify work.
Some Rights Reserved
A common misconception of Creative Commons is that the “copyleft” eliminates a person’s claim to copyright over material. Instead, Creative Commons licensing provides a means of allowing people terms by which they can share, collaborate and benefit from your work.
A Creative Commons license establishes a framework for allowing (or disallowing) a variety of uses for your work with “mix and match” licensing types to restrict or accommodate rights on work. Options include:
Public Domain — Lets authors free works from copyright completely.
By Attribution (BY) — Lets other distribute, modify, change and build upon your work as long as you are credited for the original creation. By itself, this includes the ability for other to sell the work commercially and allows them (providing they credit you) to change the licensing for the work they generate.
Share-alike (SA) — Allows for the licensing attributes to be required to carried into derivative works. So that a work provided as (CC-BY-SA) would allow users people to distribute, modify, change and build upon your work (even for commercial gain), so long as the derivative product also carried the by-sa license.
No Derivatives (ND) — Restricts the work to not allow derivatives of the work. This means others CANNOT modify or change your work. Used often as a “By Attribution, No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND)” to allow for work to be redistributed as long as you are credited and no changes are made to the work.
Non-commercial (NC) — Allows for distribution of the work only for non-commercial use.
These core types can then be compiled into various groups, allowing authors to describe completely what the licensing for their copyrighted works can carry. Like “normal” copyright, if someone wanted to use the work for something not covered by the Creative Commons license, they would need to contact you first for permission. By example, a “CC-BY-NC-ND” license would be the most restrictive allowing for redistribution of works provided that the creator is credited, no derivatives are made and that they aren’t used commercially.
For more info on the various license types, consult the Creative Commons’ “Meet the Licenses” page, or using their “Choose a license form” to get started providing your work under a Creative Commons license.
Tools
When users people choose to enact a Creative Commons license for their website, CreativeCommons.org provides tools and tutorials on adding the license information to your website or links to free hosting services that have incorporated their licensing. Among the tools are information on including RDF/XML metadata with the works that will describe the license and the work, making it easier to automatically process and locate licensed works.
Worldwide Licensing
While the original Creative Commons licensing was written with U.S. copyright laws in mind, the organization has been making headway into creating and drafting jurisdiction-specific licensing for other countries. Creative Commons International has completed and developed licenses for: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, mainland China, Colombia, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, South Aftica, South Kora, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK: England and Wales; UK: Scotland, and the United States.
Developing licenses and discussing them is in progress for: Greece, Ireland, Jordan, Macedonia, Nigeria, Philippines, Romania, Serbia, and the Ukraine.
Finding Creative Commons Licensed Material
There are several resources on the internet to help people find work that is licensed under Creative Commons.
• Creative Commons’ Search Page
• Yahoo!’s Creative Commons Search (Beta)
• Much of the content on the Wikimedia Commons is provided by their authors under some variation of either the Creative Commons, Public Domain or GFDL licenses. Individual sound, video and image files will list information about the license status of the works, plus you can view their Category of Creative Common Licenses and various subcategories.
• Many of the users of people who use Flickr.com provide their images under the Creative Commons licensing. You can view images by various licensing on their Creative Commons page.
• CommonContent.org maintains a catalog of works licensed in the Creative Commons.
• EveryStockPhoto.com is a search engine and member bookmarking service for Creative Commons Photos
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