Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a great tool to use when looking for items to use in the classroom. But first you must understand what Creative Commons is and how it works.
- Creative Commons is a license for many works, songs, videos, images and other digital materials. It is a great resource for academic institutions as the works allow for use in a (non-profit institution’s) classroom as long as credit is given to the work.
- Creative Commons has six licenses (see box to right). The most restrictive license allows the use of the work for non-commercial purposes, as long as credit is provided for the work. The most lenient license will allow you to “distribute, remix, tweak and build upon the original work” provided credit is given. To see more about Creative Commons Licenses and how they differ, see About CC licenses.
- To search for Creative Commons works, start here: CC Search. (If using for PCC purposes uncheck the box next to “use for commercial purposes.”)
Creative Commons Web Resources
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Creative Commons (CC) Locate all sorts of materials licensed under Creative Commons. These are much easier to use, because terms of use are laid out for you! Explore the different kinds of licenses – the most flexible ones are those that do not include the “ND”, or No Derivatives, clause.
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Flickr Advanced Search Advanced search in Flickr gives you the option to ONLY search within Creative Commons-licensed content
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ccMixter ccMixter is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want.
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Google Images In the “Advanced Search”, you can limit your search results to images “available for reuse.” Be careful – just as Google Scholar’s metadata is suspect, so is its ability to eliminate copyrighted images. Look for additional confirmation that the image you plan on using is truly free of copyright restrictions.
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Jamendo Jamendo is a community of free, legal and unlimited music published under Creative Commons licenses.
Share your music, download your favorite artists! -
Why YouTube Adopting Creative Commons Is a Big Deal YouTube’s catalog of Creative Commons clips is being seeded with more than 10,000 videos from partners like C-SPAN, Voice of America and Al-Jazeera
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The Power of Open Creative Commons created the legal and technical infrastructure that allows effective sharing of knowledge, art and data by individuals, organizations and governments. More importantly, millions of creators took advantage of that infrastructure to share work that enriches the global commons for all humanity. The Power of Open collects the stories of those creators.
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Met Museum in New York From The Met's webpage regarding these images "You are welcome to use images of artworks in The Met's collection that the Museum believes to be in the public domain, or those to which the Museum waives any copyright it might have, for any purpose, including commercial and noncommercial use, free of charge and without requiring permission from the Museum. To identify these images, look for the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) icon (Creative Commons Zero (CC0) icon) directly below the image." You will see the words Public Domain. The Met has identified "more than 375,000 images of public-domain artworks for both scholarly and commercial purposes."
Creative Commons Licenses
Creative Commons.Org (a group of intellectual property experts – lawyers and librarians) created a set of copyright licenses free for public use that define the “middle way” between copyright and the public domain – or between all rights reserved and no rights reserved.
Creative Commons have defined a set of licenses so that authors and artists can clearly define what rights they are keeping, and what they are sharing – for free or for fee.
These Creative Commons licenses, six variations in total, allow for creators to keep their copyright while inviting other uses of their work – or a “some rights reserved” copyright.
Using these creative commons licenses, creators can choose a set of conditions they wish to apply to their work.The basic four conditions are:
Attribution : You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request.
Noncommercial : You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only.
No Derivative Works : You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.
Share Alike : You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.
These conditions can be combined to produce six licenses (all licenses include attribution):
- Attribution
- Attribution – Share Alike
- Attribution – Non Commercial
- Attribution – No Derivatives
- Attribution – Share Alike – Non Commercial
- Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives
Your license choice will be expressed in 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.
Go to http://creativecommons.org for more information.
For open source music: http://ccmixter.org
For open source images: http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons
*Adapted from the Creative Commons website (creativecommons.org)
