Creative Commons: What is it and How Can You Utilize it?

Creative Commons is an alternative to traditional copyright rules. Commonly, most original works are protected by copyright, which reflects specific rights regarding the use and the distribution of work. Creative Commons allows copyright owners to release some of those rights while keeping others, with the goal of allowing access to and sharing of intellectual and creative property.

Copyright has been an all-or-nothing plan: a work is either in the public domain, or its owner states “all rights reserved”. The term or period of copyright protection for most has increased significantly, from 14 years to 70 years past the death of the work’s creator.

The creators of Creative Commons wanted to start a central ground of “some rights reserved” that respects intellectual property while growing the acceptable uses of protected material. All licenses need acknowledgement, and the slightest limiting only needs attribution.

Using Creative Commons, a photographer, for instance, may choose to allow anyone to duplicate her photos or make imitative works from them, as long as it is done for non-commercial purposes.

You will see in many of the Alfalfa Content Generator blog posts, there are images all of which were taken from the photographic social networking site Flickr, under the Creative Commons licence agreement which is why you see the attribute or credit under each image.

There are a few derivatives when it comes to Creative Commons, such as:

• Attribution: People licensing these works may copy, distribute, display and perform the work.
• Non-Commercial: People licensing these may copy, distribute, display and perform works, but may only use it for non-commercial purposes.
• No Derivative Works: People licensing these may copy, distribute, display and perform on exact copies of these works, not copied works.
• Share-alike: People licensing these may distribute copied works, but only under a license like the license that rules the original work.

Having things like images in the public domain not only allows exposure for the owner of that image, but allows you to have good looking sites, blog posts and newsletters – so keep this in mind when you are considering content for your online activities.  If you want to learn more about Creative Commons then check out their website.