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Thing 11 - Creative Commons

Thing 11 : Creative Commons: Webcam Conversation

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2. What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation that provides licences allowing the creator of a work to free up the distribution of that work and to let people know how they can use it without having to seek permission, or risk infringing copyright.

Creative Commons licences are probably the most commonly used of the generic Open Content Licences that enable the easier and more widespread use of copyright protected materials through, for instance, Open Access journals, repositories, and so on.

You may remember from my mini copyright guide on this blog that as soon as you take a photograph, write a blog entry, write down or record a song, draw a diagram, etc. it’s automatically protected by copyright with “all rights reserved” . A CC licence specifies which of those rights the creator is prepared to share with other people:  it says “some rights reserved” rather than all of them.

all rights reserved vs some rights reserved

The exclusive ‘rights’ that an author (or other copyright owner) has in their work include copying, publication, performance, adaptation, and communicating online - these are activities that only the copyright owner can do with a work - unless they give someone else permission to do it (or unless the Copyright Act makes an exception such as Fair Dealing).

By using a CC licence the author isn’t giving up their copyright (though that can be done with a Public Domain licence), but they are saying that they only want to reserve some of their rights - maybe, the right to be attributed as the author and the right to commercialise the work.  Under those conditions a user could copy and publish the work on a website, they could adapt or add to it, perform it, and so on.  They would probably also be required to use a similar licence on any work based on the original.

For instance, the mini copyright guide is based on the Blog, Podcast, Vodcast and Wiki Copyright Guide for Australia which was published with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.  Seeing this licence meant I knew that, without seeking any further permission, I could adapt the blog guide to suit this programme so long as I attributed the original work, applied a similar licence to my work, and don’t use it for commercial purposes.

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3. Why are we learning about Creative Commons ?

When we use these tools we’re actually being both users and creators of copyright protected materials - if you want to include somebody else’s work - a photo for instance - in your blog you usually have to have their permission in some form, but if you find an image that’s already got a Creative Commons licence you know you can go ahead - and if you want to make your own photos, music and so on available for other people to work/play with, you can add a creative commons licence to your own materials.

Creative Commons licences are being used by musicians, photographers, Ridley Scott, ecologists and other scientists, universities, the government … even just ‘ordinary’ bloggers like the participants of this programme.

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4. What you need to do to complete this Thing

• find a Creative Commons licensed image
• embed it in your blog - easy peasy!

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5. How to search for a licensed image and embed it in your blog

1. There are millions of CC licensed image; these are just a few of the ways to find them:

• Creative Commons’ own search site: search.creativecommons.org
• Google’s advanced image search: http://images.google.com/advanced_image_search - select the appropriate ‘usage rights’
  
• Wikimedia Commons has both still and moving images, sound archives, and more more more

2. Select and embed your chosen image

2.1 Search for your image

• open a new tab in your browser
• search one of the sites above for an image to use
• right click in the image - this will bring up a floating menu
• scroll down the menu to ‘copy image location’ and left click

2.2 Embed the image

• open another tab in your browser ( <CTRL> <T> )
• log into your blog
• go to Posts > Add new to start a new post
• just above the text tools you will see the words ‘Add media:’ - click the little oblong box to the right - this takes you to a selection of options for adding an image
• click on the tab labelled ‘From URL’
• right click in the ‘Image URL’ box and left click  ‘Paste’ from the floating menu that will appear
• add attribution if required by the licensor  (Optional - add a title and/or caption )
• click on ‘Insert into Post’
• go back to your post - and there’s the image!
• write about the exercise or the image if you want; then save, preview, and publish your post

6. If you want to try more….

Here are some more sites where you can download CC (or equivalent) licensed works .

You may even want to share your own creations - maybe via the ABC’s Pool Project , which offers archival material as well as participants’ . Once you’ve uploaded something the conversation can continue through this and other similar projects.

Mashable offers more than 150 online video resources and tools for creation and collaboration

sitepoint has 30+ really good CC licenced media sites

The Internet Archive has great moving image and live music collections - but you will need to check the terms of use on specific items

5 minute Life Videopedia is a a site that makes its own ’some rights reserved’ terms of use - it hosts fab 5 minute videos about magic tricks, recipes, business, techy stuff, spirituality, sewing - anything someone wants to tell the world about… that someone could be you - remember ‘creative’ doesn’t necessarily mean arty-farty