While sitting in a movie cinema, waiting for the movie to begin, we have all seen the advertisement that reminds us that downloading music is stealing. The owner of this video-advertisement has set the permissions of this video to "share" and has made available the embed code for inserting it into blogs, websites, etc.. So here it is:
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxtoaTF9hu8)
With the widespread downloading of music and movies form the Internet, it is apparent that most people don't know or understand copyright or choose to ignore it. Many people are not aware of the fact that whenever you create something, a song, a poem, a piece of art or a story, you automatically own an All Rights Reserved Copyright to that piece of creativity. This protects your creativity to uses you don't consent to. However, this isn't always what the author of the piece of creativity had intended when they created it. Maybe the creator intended to share their work with the world. What better way is there to get your work noticed than if it can be freely shared with millions and millions of people on the web?
I picture a young musical band starting up with a few songs to their credit, and how they would love to have DJ's around the world using their songs so they could get signed by a big recording studio. If the music was good, this would expose their music to a very large audience in a short amount of time. Then, if the band were to put a video on YouTube, the millions of i-Pod and i-Phone owners could download that video onto their iTube app and awareness of the song by word-of-mouth could spread exponentially. I believe this is similar to the success story of the South Korean musician Psy, and his song that went viral on YouTube, titled: "Gangnam Style". Or consider medical researchers who would like to share their work with the medical community in an attempt to find a cure for a disease, such as cancer.
Sometimes full copyright is too restrictive and so a non-profit organization was formed in 2001, to help make creative work available for others to build upon legally and to share (Creative Commons). The organization is called Creative Commons, which will provide free licenses to allow the creator to lighten the restrictions of a full copyright.
(Source URL: http://www.dent.umich.edu/site/copyright)
A Creative Commons license gives the creator the opportunity to decide which rights of a full copyright that they would like to waive. It would allow a photographer to share his/her photos with people to use, but not allow companies to sell them. It would give the upstart music band a chance to allow their songs to be used and remixed, royalty-free. A Creative Commons license would allow me to share this blog and have readers re-publish it as long as they give me credit.
To help me better understand the process of obtaining a free Creative Commons license I decided to apply for one to refine the rights reserved and the rights I am able to waive under the Creative Commons agreement.
Here is what the application looked like:
This is what the license looks like that I received:
Information & Computer Technology Blog by James Campbell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
It basically allows people to use the content of this blog and give appropriate credit for its use. The "appropriate credit" piece is represented by the person symbol of the license. The crossed out dollar sign indicates that the content of this blog cannot be used for commercial purposes. Finally, the equals sign symbol indicates that no derivatives are permitted. This means that if the material is remixed, transformed, or build upon the user may not distribute the modified material.
The process was easy and only took about a minute. By including the license on my blog it now lets visitors know what rights are reserved and what rights are waived for my work. If you want to apply for your own Creative Commons license just visit:
http://creativecommons.org/choose/
The most permissive of the Creative Commons licenses is called a Free Cultural Works license and is represented by the following asterisk symbol:
(Source URL: http://creativecommons.org/freeworks)
It signifies that the work can be used, shared, and remixed by others (Creative Commons).
Here is what the application looked like:
This is what the license looks like that I received:
Information & Computer Technology Blog by James Campbell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
It basically allows people to use the content of this blog and give appropriate credit for its use. The "appropriate credit" piece is represented by the person symbol of the license. The crossed out dollar sign indicates that the content of this blog cannot be used for commercial purposes. Finally, the equals sign symbol indicates that no derivatives are permitted. This means that if the material is remixed, transformed, or build upon the user may not distribute the modified material.
The process was easy and only took about a minute. By including the license on my blog it now lets visitors know what rights are reserved and what rights are waived for my work. If you want to apply for your own Creative Commons license just visit:
http://creativecommons.org/choose/
The most permissive of the Creative Commons licenses is called a Free Cultural Works license and is represented by the following asterisk symbol:
(Source URL: http://creativecommons.org/freeworks)
It signifies that the work can be used, shared, and remixed by others (Creative Commons).
Hey James,
ReplyDeleteOnce again, I love the graphics you have added to your blog - and believe me when I say that I appreciate what you have done here! (Just spent a bunch of time in D2L trying to add graphics with no success!) Anyways - great piece of information! The importance of teachers being able to share and collaborative under the Creative Commons licensing is so important ! Teachers can grow so significantly by sharing!
Great post!
Tracy