Introduction Into Creative Commons

How many of you have thought about protecting the content you create on your blog? Besides copyrighting your material, you may want to look into using one of the various Creative Commons licenses that are available.

Using the Creative Commons licensing program, you can actively decide on which grounds your content can and can not be used on the web. For instance, content creators may want to completely lock down their content while others would like to block their content from being used in non-commercial environments but would allow the use of the content under certain conditions. The Creative Commons licensing structure provides a flexible means of defining the use of your content which is one of the reasons why Creative Commons is so popular.

I encourage you to consider reading into the different licenses that are available by clicking this link http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses After you decide on which license you would like to pursue head to this page http://creativecommons.org/license/ and select the appropriate options that fit your needs. Then, after hitting the SELECT A LICENSE button, you’ll be able to choose which image you’d like to display on your site along with a block of HTML code that you’ll need to copy and paste into your blog..

Now if anyone has any doubts as to using your works, they can click on the image displayed on your site. This will load a web page which clearly spells out what the user can and can’t do with the content based on the choices you made when you created the license.

Conclusion:

Do you already use some form of Creative Commons on your own blog? Do you feel like the Creative Commons licenses are enforceable? What are your thoughts on these types of licenses?

7 thoughts on “Introduction Into Creative Commons

  1. I actually just learned about this on Flickr. I was looking for some images I could use on my blog, and then I realized you can do an advanced search looking for images in Creative Commons. I think it is a great thing, but a lot of people still have no clue what it is and what the different types are.

  2. Thanks for the comment. I could of made this post a mile long but decided to cover the basics and let the readers dive into it for themselves.

  3. I can’t say I remember a court case where the works of a user involved creative commons. I’ll have to look that up.

  4. Good Point Jeff, I don’t think Creative commons licenses are enforcable. I’m yet to see a case for that.

  5. Hey Robert. With your situation, I can see why you would move to an ‘All Rights Reserved” policy. That makes complete sense. I also see a problem with Knol and its ability to outrank things. Makes Google seem real fishy and they need to stop that.

  6. Hey Jeff,

    Great post, very informative for people unfamiliar with CC. Unfortunately, I have just dropped my Creative Commons license and moved to a “All Rights Reserved” policy. Why? Knol.

    If someone else can take my work and use it on a Knol and rank higher than my original content, I have a problem with that. Even in it’s strictest form, CC does not protect against being outranked by your own content. Unless I am looking at this all wrong or until Google controls the Knol’s “instant ranking,” I feel that I should be the only one using my content and benefiting from it.

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