By Tim Shier on 2008/07/09
As I'm sure you are well aware, copyright infringements are becoming increasingly more common and a blatant disregard for the laws surrounding copyrights has become quite normal. The reality is that us human types have a natural urge to share information and the law is just getting in the way of that need.
Creative Commons: The Solution
Creative Commons is a set of licenses that embraces the need to share. Instead of the typical "all rights reserved", Creative Commons advocates "some rights reserved" licenses. It is focussed on educators, scientists and authors but can be applied to just about any information (including some of the more difficult content such as programs, sound bytes and video to mention a few).
As an intermediate step between full copyright and public domain content, it forms an excellent method of controlling how content can be shared.
The licenses, which exist within Creative Commons, range from the very relaxed "Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License" (any re-use must reference the work to the original content provider but it can be used anywhere by anybody regardless of their intent or objective) to the highly restrictive "Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License" (any re-use must include the full item, cannot amount to commercial gain and must reference the original content provider).
Registering For A Creative Commons License
I feel a bit ridiculous even describing this process - it's that simple!
- Direct your browser to http://creativecommons.org/license/.
- You will be presented with 3 choices (I did say it was easy). Each represents the level of control you want to put on your work. These include:
- Allow Commercial use of your work? [Yes/No]
- Allow Modifications to your work?
- Yes
- Yes - as long as its share and share alike. This basically says that if anybody wants to use your content they must register it with the same license under which you registered the original content.
- No
- Jurisdiction of your license [select unported for international governance or the country you want to be covered for]
- Fill in your details below.
- Click select a license.
- Select the license from the visual options supplied.
After you have selected the relevant license, Creative Commons allow it to be expressed in one of three ways:
- Commons Deed - A plain-language summary of the license, complete with the relevant icons.
- Legal Code - The fine print that you need to be sure the license will stand up in court.
- Digital Code - A machine-readable translation of the license that helps search engines and other applications identify your work by its terms of use. As an aside, most search engines now allow you to search for content that has been registered under a particular license (select this under the "advanced search" option). There are also some minor indications that pages that share their content more freely get some ranking benefit.
Could that be any simpler? No Lawyers, no fuss, no charge - a couple of clicks and you are covered. Exactly how you want to be.
As previously mentioned, knowledge sharing is important and we at Quirk have taken a stand; we aim to share all of the content on GottaQuirk as well as all of our other educational eMarketing resources under a Creative Commons license. Currently, we are in the process of implementing the correct licensing (we have lots of documents). So, watch this space as we make our content available for use freely and very few limitations.
Once again, we at Quirk are doing our best to make the most of developing online opportunities to share and share alike.
