A couple of weeks ago I was at a conference for folks who create content online. Creative Commons is a great way to share content you have created or look for content you might use.

What is Creative Commons?

I thought I had written about this earlier – but I wasn’t able to find it. According to their site…

Creative Commons provides free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof. It’s kind of a copyright junior in that it protects your rights and offer some rights to others to use your content.

When you license your content with a Creative Commons license you have a choice of four levels of “sharing”, which means others have varying levels of permissions for using your content. The options are:

Attribution (by) – 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.

Share Alike (sa) – You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

Non-Commercial (nc) – You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for non-commercial purposes only.

No Derivative Works (nd) – You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

You can learn more here: http://creativecommons.org

Next week I’ll be writing about how to get copyright.