Saturday, February 13, 2010

Creative Commons

When I first heard about Creative Commons, I didn't really know much about it. All I knew was that it kind of related to copyright. But now, I see that Creative Commons is better than copyright laws. According to creativecommons.org, Creative Commons works to create the body of a piece of work that is available to the public for free and allows for legal sharing, use, and remixing. It gives everyone, from musicians to photographers, a simple way to grant copyright permission to their creative work.

Creative Commons has licenses that allows certain uses for a piece of work while keeping the copyright, which is referred to as "some rights reserved", as long as credit is given to the original creator of the piece of work. With traditioanl copyright, a piece of work usually has "all rights reserved", which means that no one can use copyrighted material without the permission of the person who created the work. A person can also avoid dealing with copyright altogether by using "no rights reserved", which allows open sharing of a piece of work to anyone.

As Esther Wojcicki noted in her online article, "Creative Commons in 2009,, the Accomplishments of Worldwide Sharing", she noted that some major websites have adopted CC licensing, such as Google and Yahoo. The Image search results on these sites now restrict users to find images tagged with CC licensing so that people can share and use images without breaking copyright laws.

I believe that CC as a tool for independent content producers is neat because people can acknowledge another person's work that may not be well known, and credit will be given to that person, and may also give them a big break, especially for someone like a musician that's trying to make it big. If a major recording artist uses a local artist that they may know but not everyone knows, the major artist can give credit to the other artist for using some of their work, and people may notice that their work is creative and they may become known as well. This helps artists like John Woodward since he uses CC licensing. It allows people to use, sample, or remix his work, as long as people give him credit for his piece of work. He may also be able to profit off of people using his work as well.

Here's an example of me using a photo from a creative commons website. It is a creative commons logo idea from Flickr user labguest:



The Flickr user had "some rights reserved", which meant that I could use his logo idea as long as I wasn't using it for commercial use and as long as I give hime credit for it.

Creative Commons is very cool because it doesn't have all of the restrictions of traditional copyright laws. It allows people to use other people's content as long as the person gives the origianl person credit for the work, which in the end saves a lot of hassle. Creative Commons is definitely the future for copyright and for media in general.





Information from blog post found from the following links:
http://creativecommons.org/about/what-is-cc
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/esther-wojcicki/creative-commons-in-2009_b_366548.html

Photo found at the following link:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/labguest/3287937707/

YouTube videos found at the following links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BESbnMJg9M&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io3BrAQl3so&feature=related

5 comments:

  1. I enjoyed reading your blog post. I do agree that creative commons is way better than traditional copyright laws, since it is very flexible for the users. I also believe that cc will be the way of the future, since it can have such a positive impact for content producers worldwide. Great job!

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  2. I love what you said in regards to people acknowledging another person's work that may not be well known. I agree completely. That actually is pretty much what I said too in my post in that it can make an artist famous. We hear stories all the time about artists who end up making it because of things like Creative Commons and other tools like it. Like I said it's a win win situation for everyone and if an artist doesn't want to share their work they simply don't put it on Creative Commons. Job well done!

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  3. Great use of media. I agree with you that copyright is a useful tool for artists, especially those looking for a big break in their career, a chance to get discovered. Good job on this post. This post shows that you understood the topic and if I landed here without knowing what Creative Commons was about, I could leave here knowing what it's all about, especially from your video content.

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  4. Terrone - good work. Seems you have a good grasp of CC. But, do be careful of grammar, spelling, etc. It's okay to write in a casual style. But, be sure your reader's aren't sidetracked by silly mistakes. Also, you mentioned that the image from Flickr required only attribution . . . but you didn't actually give them credit. Just putting a link leaves it up to the reader to find the source (you also didn't put a hyperlink - so the reader has to cut and pasted the URL). True credit would be something like: "Photo image by Flickr user Labguest via Creative Commons License."

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  5. I liked how you really got across the whole point of CC, what it does and what can be done with it. I really wanted to make a cool looking video like the ones you included, unfortunately I'm not very talented with movie maker.

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