Internet Culture: Creative Commons

Creative Commons Copyright

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.

Hi and welcome again to CUINNOVATE. Its been an exciting launch week and I’m looking forward to getting some forums started in the coming weeks. One question I’ve had is the symbols on the bottom left hand side of the screen. These are the symbols for a new type of licensing that has emerged in the internet realm termed “creative commons”.

Creative commons was created to bridge the gap between one extreme of copyright all rights reserved and complete anarchy. Recognizing that it is next to impossible to regulate the internet use of content (too easy to cut and paste content and code) and the real power of the internet is to collaborate with collective intelligence of the world, creative commons was created as a not for profit to provide free licenses with terms of use for internet sites. For more details, check out the creative commons website for Canada at: www.creativecommons.ca.

Here is a summary reprinted from the creative commons website above of what is meant by these symbols we have chosen for this site.

License Conditions

Creators choose a set of conditions they wish to apply to their work:

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.

Share Alike

You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

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.

So for our CUINNOVATE site, we are asking you follow the creative commons licenses for attribution and non-commercial. You are free to use all the content, just reference where it came from and don’t repackage and sell it without agreement of the content owner.