Creative Commons: The What, Why and How

What Is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that provides tools (licenses) for people to standardize the way they grant copyright permissions to their work (i.e. images, blogs, videos, etc).  Creative Commons allows you to license and publish your work and make people aware of the ways they can use your work.  Rather than the standard default of "all rights reserved" for your work, Creative Commons allows you to grant "some rights reserved," where the copyright for your work is still protected, but you can grant permissions for certain uses of your work.  Basically, Creative Commons (CC) licensing allows you to share your work for free, but under the parameters you desire.

Below, I’ve outlined a brief overview of the available license conditions that you can apply to your work.  For the full breakdown and explanation of each license condition, please visit Creative Common's About Licenses.  These conditions help you set parameters around the various ways people can use your work, from very accommodating to more restrictive.  Here is a short breakdown of the available license conditions:

Attribution (by): This allows others to distribute, display and adjust your work, even use your work commercially or in derivative works, as long as they give you credit for originally creating the work in the way you request.  This is the broadest license you can grant to your work.

Share Alike (sa): This allows others to distribute derivative works, but only under a license identical to the original work.

Non-Commercial (nc): This allows others to copy, display, and distribute your work, but not for commercial purposes.

No Derivative Works (nd): This allows others to copy, display, and distribute your work, but without any adjustments.  The work must be used exactly as is, with no derivative works.

Please note that there are six main licenses you can use when you are publishing your work through a Creative Commons license.  These licenses are variations of the license conditions outlined above.  They are as follows:

• Attribution (cc by)
• Attribution Share Alike (cc by-sa)
• Attribution No Derivatives (cc by-nd)
• Attribution Non-Commercial (cc by-nc)
• Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (cc by-nc-sa)
• Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (cc by-nc-nd)

Why Use Creative Commons?

The great thing about Creative Commons is that it's a win-win for both the person who is creating and licensing the work as well the person accessing and using the work.  It broadens the creator's visibility and reach, while also providing a needed resource for the end user.  To give you an example you can put into context, I’d like to explain how we benefit from Creative Commons here at Meylah on a regular basis.  We frequently use images licensed through Creative Commons on Flickr for our blog posts, such as the main image you see above provided to us by Yohei Yamashita on Flickr.  It's wonderful because Creative Commons allows us to access amazing images (and FREE too!) that fit the themes of the topics we are writing about while spreading visibility to the photographers who took those images.

How Do I Access Creative Commons?

My favorite way to utilize Creative Commons is through Flickr.  Flickr has done an amazing job making images and videos easily accessible and making it simple to identify if they have Creative Commons licensing.  As you are looking at any image on Flickr, you can easily identify the licensing of that image within the right hand column under 'Additional Information' - see the image below as an example:

 
When you click on the licensing link "Some rights reserved," Flickr will take you to a page where you will get a full explanation of how that image is licensed.  Within Flickr, you can also use the advanced search function to identify works with Creative Commons licensing.  In the near future, we'll do a Byte-Syze Learning tutorial to walk you through the full process of searching and selecting images using Creative Commons licensing.

Ultimately, there are various ways to access works with Creative Commons licensing.  Search by Creative Commons is one avenue for you to access search services to find available works, but PLEASE NOTE that you will need to follow the links for whatever search items come up to verify that they are actually under Creative Commons licensing. 

And, make sure you are using the works within the parameters of the licensing before you use them.  If you have any doubts about the licensing of someone’s work, run it by the creator and ask permission to use the work the way you want to!  If you do make a mistake and use someone's work inaccurately, fix it right away and notify the owner that it has been fixed.  Oh, and don’t forget to attribute the work - we usually do so by hyperlinking the image used back to the owner's page where we sourced the image.

Now, I’m off to play on Flickr!  Have fun searching for images and thank you Creative Commons (the org), you guys rock!