21 April, 2010

Creative Commons

Creative commons was founded in 2001 with the support of Centre for the Public Domain. In 2002, the first set of copyright licences were made for free to the public. They developed their licences by the Free Software Foundation’ GNU (similar to Unix) General Public Licences. They also incorporated a Web application to help you licence your work freely for certain uses, or conditions; or dedicate created work to the domain. In the following years of their initial release, Creative Commons and its licences have grown and been further improved.

Who uses Creative Commons Licence?

Al Jazeera – Launched a Creative Commons Repository in 2009. A section of their website was dedicated to posting videos under the CC Attribution Licence.

Flickr- Flicker was one of the first major online communities to incorporate the use of Creative Commons licence, allowing photographers around the world to share their work under terms of their choosing.

Google- Utilized CC licences by enabling CC- search capabilities through their main search engine, image search engine, and book search engine, or allowing users to CC licence their own content in Picasa and Google Knol.

Youtube- Although Google owned, they have also used CC licences in their audio swap program, which allows users to swap “All Rights Reserved” music for similar sounding CC licensed tracks.

Wikipedia- Changed their licensing recently from a GNU Free Documentation License to a Creative Commons Attribution –Share Alike license. By changing to a CC licence they allow Wikipedia (and the entire collection of Wikimedia sites) content to legally flow in and out at ease, enabling a great cultural resource in digital revolution.

With a Creative Commons Licence, you get to keep your copyrighted work but allow people to copy and share distribute your work providing they give you credit. These are on the conditions you specify on the creative commons website when uploading the work.

Creative Commons helps you publish your work online while letting others know exactly what they can and can't do with your work. When you choose a license, we provide you with tools and tutorials that let you add license information to our own site, or to one of several free hosting services that have incorporated Creative Commons.

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