Jul 09
10
What is Creative Commons?
As stated on their website (creativecommons.org): “Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that increases sharing and improves collaboration.”
Stated another way, “Creative Commons” is an organization and a series of specialized licenses that you can associate to your work, for free, to control its distribution. The licenses boil down to controlling the rights to your intellectual property. However, the “control” is quite different than copyright laws. Creative Commons licenses “do” allow your work to be shared and used by others, but with certain limits (see licenses below).
As stated on their website:
Our tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The Creative Commons licenses enable people to easily change their copyright terms from the default of “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.”
In essence, you are granting your work to be shared, but you want such work to be properly attributed to you.
NOTE: Creative Commons is “not” copyright, which is a highly restrictive legal control over your work (which, unfortunately, is abused on the Internet).
Further referring to their website:
Creative Commons aspires to cultivate a commons in which people can feel free to reuse not only ideas, but also words, images, and music without asking permission — because permission has already been granted to everyone.
One way to look at using Creative Commons licensing is as a media for promoting your work and your name to others without those individuals needing to contact you. On the one hand, you don’t get paid, but on the other hand, your work may benefit from wider distribution than you might have been able to gain. Used well, the wider exposure might be leveraged into paid applications for other work.
Another way to look at Creative Commons is as a potential opportunity for free advertising for your business, your art, your words, your software, your ideas – your intellectual property.
The following are the six primary Creative Commons licenses:
Atribution
This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.
Attribution Share Alike
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.
Attribution No Derivatives
This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.
Attribution Non-Commercial
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute your work just like the by-nc-nd license (see below), but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.
Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives
This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, allowing redistribution. This license is often called the “free advertising” license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.