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Creative Commons licenses are an easy way to share your content freely online. Let's walk through the different types of licenses and what they mean.
Search for Creative Commons licensed works at the Creative Commons website.
Flickr has millions of Creative Commons licensed photographs.
The Free Music Archive, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp are wonderful sources of Creative Commons music.
YouTube allows video creators to license their videos via Creative Commons.
And Freesound is a great database of Creative Commons licensed sound effects.
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[male speaker] You've probably seen symbols like these
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at some point during your adventures on the Internet
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or perhaps you've already heard of Creative Commons.
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Creative Commons is a bit like Open Source for stuff that isn't software.
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It's a way to license a website, a blog, a book, a video, a movie, a song, a photograph—even a text book—
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with that same spirit of openness and freedom that Open Source provides,
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but unlike Open Source, there are only a few types of Creative Commons licenses.
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They're very easy to understand when you encounter them
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and it's easy to pick out a license for your own work should Creative Commons be the way you decide to go.
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Each Creative Commons license is a combination in one way or another of four key ideas.
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The first is attribution.
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Attribution just means that you give the creator of the work that you're using credit in whatever you make with it.
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So if you use a Creative Commons licensed photograph on your website
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you have to make sure you're giving the original photographer credit on that page.
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You'll often see people giving credit to the authors of Creative Commons music in YouTube videos. That's attribution.
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Next is non-commercial.
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Anything licensed with a non-commercial stipulation just means that you can't use that work in for-profit projects.
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If you run a non-profit, or your app is free, or you're making a video that you're not charging anything for
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you'll probably be fine using non-commercial licensed works in your own project.
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Most Creative Commons licensed stuff—photos, books, videos, whatever—
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carries this non-commercial stipulation.
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Then we have no derivatives.
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We mentioned derivative works when we were talking about Open Source and WordPress.
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This just means that if you're going to use, again, a photograph carrying that no derivatives requirement
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you can't alter the photograph at all.
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You can use it, just don't crop it, retouch it, turn it upside down—any of that.
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Use of the photo as it is or not at all.
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And finally, there's ShareAlike.
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This should also remind you of that GPL Open Source software license.
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If you're going to make use of a ShareAlike work in your project
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your project has to be shared with a similar Creative Commons license.
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So those are the four parts of Creative Commons licenses.
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Not every license includes all four, but now that we've learned each part the names of them should be pretty self-explanatory.
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Attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives requires credit, not-for-profit use, and no alterations to the work you're using. That's it.
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As long as you can abide by those terms of the license you're welcome to use the photo, the song, the text—
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whatever it might be free of charge in your own project.
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Attribution, non-commercial, ShareAlike drops the no derivatives requirement
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and asks you to share your project via Creative Commons as well.
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Attribution, non-commercial has only those two stipulations; credit and not-for-profit use.
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Attribution, no derivatives drops that non-commercial requirement, but doesn't allow for altering of the work.
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Attribution, ShareAlike also allows for commercial usage but requires the sharing via a similar license.
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And finally, there's just plain attribution.
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Credit is the only requirement for an attribution license, otherwise you can use that work however you like.
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In just a little over a decade since Creative Commons was founded
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there has been an explosion of CC-licensed content around the world.
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Flickr, for example, host millions of Creative Commons-licensed photographs.
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YouTube has an option to add Creative Commons licenses to videos.
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News Network AlJazeera licenses a lot of their footage and photographs via a simple attribution only license.
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Tons of great stuff on the web utilizes Creative Commons.
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Popular web comic XKCD, the Free Music Archive, Boing-Boing, many of the albums on SoundCloud and Bandcamp,
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the OpenStreetMap project—even Nine Inch Nails—have released music and artwork under Creative Commons licenses.
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There's just a ton of places to find great stuff for your projects,
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and I've included some great links in the teacher's notes below.
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There is actually one more Creative Commons license, and it's the elusive CC zero.
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It's just what it sounds like—no rights reserved.
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If you want to release something directly into the public domain
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no permission or credit required to do anything with your work,
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relinquish all copyright, a CC zero license is a good way to do it.
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It's not very common, but there are some artists who use it, so you might actually run into it someday.
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Creative Commons is a great way not only to find photos for your site, music or sound effects for you app, or more,
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it's also a great way to share the work that you create as well.
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Whether you're making an app, a website, a blog, or even just taking photos or recordings songs of your own
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you might be interested in releasing what you make under a Creative Commons license
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with whatever requirements you're comfortable with.
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We'll talk more in the next stage about how to both protect and share what you create.
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