Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that has designed a system for users to license their work with "some rights reserved" notices, thereby allowing the work to be shared. Here's a fun little video that explains Creative Commons: http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/getcreative/ 

How can this help you with your blog postings for this assignment? Creative Commons licensed images, animations, and videos are available for you to use as long as you abide by the license. For example, most Creative Commons licensed materials require attribution, which amounts to a caption stating where the material came from. What this means is that there are thousands of photos, videos, and other media available on the Internet for you to use!

Watch this video showing how to search for Creative Commons licensed images on Flickr, a photo-sharing Website.

How can this benefit you and your work? For one thing, it can help you protect your work so that other people cannot change it or reconfigure it. It can also require other people who want to use your work to give you credit as the creator of the work. For example, say you made a really cool video about how to tie fly fishing flies. You want other people to be able to see the video, but you worked really hard on it and you'd feel bad if someone took credit for your hard work. What to do? Go ahead, post your video on YouTube, but first download and add a CreativeCommons license that would allow others to use your video as long as they didn't change it, sell it, or pretend they made it.

Here's the list of Creative Commons licenses available from their Website: http://creativecommons.org/about/