Sometimes I don’t post about things because I think everybody already knows about them. I’m trying to break myself of this habit.

I was reminded of this a couple of weeks ago when I introduced several students to the concept of the Creative Commons  licensing system.

Basically, the Creative Commons system allows a content creator to release some of the rights he/she holds under copyright for others to use the material with stipulations. As the site explains

Creative Commons is a new system, built within current copyright law, that allows you to share your creations with others and use music, movies, images, and text online that’s been marked with a Creative Commons license.

The CC system was developed along the lines of the open source software movement:

Creative Commons’ first project, in December 2002, was the release of a set of copyright licenses free for public use. Taking inspiration in part from the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), Creative Commons has developed a Web application that helps people dedicate their creative works to the public domain — or retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions. Unlike the GNU GPL, Creative Commons licenses are not designed for software, but rather for other kinds of creative works: websites, scholarship, music, film, photography, literature, courseware, etc. We hope to build upon and complement the work of others who have created public licenses for a variety of creative works. Our aim is not only to increase the sum of raw source material online, but also to make access to that material cheaper and easier. To this end, we have also developed metadata that can be used to associate creative works with their public domain or license status in a machine-readable way. We hope this will enable people to use our search application and other online applications to find, for example, photographs that are free to use provided that the original photographer is credited, or songs that may be copied, distributed, or sampled with no restrictions whatsoever. We hope that the ease of use fostered by machine- readable licenses will further reduce barriers to creativity.

There are several Creative Commons licenses:

The key terms of the core suite of Creative Commons licenses are: Attribution, NonCommercial, NoDerivatives and ShareAlike. These license elements are succinctly described as follows:

• Attribution=you must attribute the author and/or licensor in the manner they require.
• NonCommercial=you may not use the work in a manner primarily directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.
• NoDerivatives=you may only make verbatim copies of the work, you may not adapt or change it.
• ShareAlike=you may only make derivative works if you license them under the same Creative Commons license terms.

Why would student media be interested in this license system? Some media outlets might want to explore letting their content be used under a Creative Commons license. They also might find ways to use other people’s CC-licensed materials in graphic illustrations, podcasts, or video reports, for example.

To use just one example, say you wanted to put some music to an online slide show. Getting permission from a major artist would likely require contacting a record company or BMI. This is where money gets involved. They’d want to know what the slide show would look like, what the topic is, and they’d probably take a while to get back to you. Meanwhile, your topical slide show is rapidly losing its “newsiness.”

On the other hand, you could head over to the Creative Commons site and search through their audio offerings to find an artist who has already stipulated that their music can be used with attribution for something like your slide show.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 8th, 2006 at 8:41 am and is filed under Tech Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.