What is Creative Commons?

By BCM113 Group 4

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organisation who’s incentive is to “help overcome legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity to address the world’s pressing challenges.” It provides an ethical way to ensure that works are properly attributed so others can copy, distribute and make use of it. This is through Creative Commons licenses and public domain tools as well as working with major institutions and governments to further implement open licensing and uphold the correct use of CC licenses and their content. In doing so people can encourage the reuse of their works.

How does one obtain a Creative Commons license? 

According to the creative commons website, there are 7 steps an individual should take to ensure they understand which license they need. 

• Understanding what creative commons is
• Researching the licenses
• Making sure their work is copyrightable
• Making sure they have the rights
• Making sure they understand how the licenses operate
• Being specific about what they are licensing
• Seeing what the impact may be if they are a member of a collecting society

Once these steps have been completed, the individual can access the license chooser page on the CC Website and begin selecting their license.

What are the different types of licenses offered?

There are six different types of licenses offered, providing everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardised way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law. 

1. Attribution license (CC BY) – This license is the most permissive and allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format on the condition that all credit is given to the creator – allows commercial use.

2. Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA) – This license allows people to use the work for any purpose (commercially and in modified form) as long as attribution is given to the creator. 

3. Attribution-NonCommercial license (CC BY-NC) – This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. 
4.  Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (CC BY-NC-SA) – This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms. 

5.  Attribution-NoDerivatives license (CC BY-ND) – This license allows reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use. 

6. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license (CC BY-NC-ND) – This license allows reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. 

Where can content makers find CC material?

To make content more usable and accessible to creators and researchers, Creative Commons Australia has a dedicated search portal that allows for said creators to search based on keyword, licence type, or type of the material.

Major search engines Google and Yahoo! are another source of CC Material for information, using metadata that allows the creator to filter results based on whether content is available to be reused, and how you can reuse it, through advanced settings.

Through these search engines, material from sites with immense amounts of resources can be accessed, such as over 90 million CC licensed photos and videos on Flickr, Australian themed images hosted by the National Library of Australia through Picture Australia, and an archive of remixable music on CC Mixter, to name a few. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation also runs a multimedia site, called ABC Pool, which includes CC licensed video, music, text, art and archival material to be used by content makers.

This allows for multimedia such as videos, blogs, essays and presentations to come together in a more interactive and in depth way through the use of CC search engines and dedicated websites of CC content.