Taking advantage of creative commons content for your blog
Who has the time to go out and snap photos of abstract subjects to use as complementary images in blog posts?
Especially if are not willing to pilfer the copyrighted work of others, it may be difficult finding content published online that the author explicitly allows anyone to share.
Enter the Creative Commons License founded in 2001 by Larry Lessig Hal Abelson, Eric Eldred and a few other cyber-law geeks that you probably never heard of.
With the Creative Commons License, individual content producers can specify which rights they are willing to freely cede and how they want to be attributed. The license can be used for anything defined by copyright law as intellectual property, including: videos, photos, software, etc..
What does these mean for the blogger?
Not only can you publish content — like pictures and video — that is not yours on your blog, but you can alter the content if the license permits. Online publishers attach licenses to their content with any of the following specifications.
With 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. With non-derivatives, you let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it. With sharealike, you allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work. Click here to see a list explaining all of the license types and combinations.
The concept is simple — people want to get their brand out by having their content freely distributed so they release it with a license that allows some rights to be reserved. Think of it as copyleft rather then copyright.
I use creative commons licenses extensively on this blog. With Flickr, I can search for creative commons images using the advanced search option, then place the images in my blog posts with the author attributions in the caption. I win because I get great photos for my readers to rest their eyes on in-between tedious blocks of text; the image author wins because he/she gets an occasional visitor from my site interested in his/her stuff.
Below is a great video called “Mayer and Bettle 2″ which explains CC.
Mayer and Bettle 2″
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