By Amy Schindler

Creative Commons licenses offer an alternative to full copyright. Creative Commons is a non-profit corporation that provides “free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.” These licenses are now commonly found on photo sharing sites, blogs (including this site), theses, dissertations, and other published material (the institutional repositories at my university began offering a Creative Commons option last year as well).

Tasks

1. Read about Creative Commons (see also links in the Resources section below) and explore images available from repositories via The Commons on Flickr.
2. If you have uploaded images to Flickr, go through the exercise of selecting Creative Commons licenses for your images (you can choose to not retain the CC license on your images, but just go through the basic steps here).
3. Consider adding a Creative Commons license to your blog.

Blog Prompts

• Would you consider Creative Commons license for material you personally create? Why or why not?
• Discuss the benefits of the Flickr Commons to all archival repositories, including those who are not currently participating institutions.

Resources

• Library of Congress Report on its Flickr pilot: “For the Common Good” (December 11, 2008). 
• Cushla Kapitzke, “Rethinking Copyrights for the Library through Creative Commons Licensing,” Library Trends Vol. 58, No. 1 (Summer 2009).
• EDUCAUSE article on “7 Things You Should Know About Creative Commons” (March 15, 2007).