Sharing Your Work

All right. So we've learned how to register our work, and we know where to put notices on it if we want to. Fantastic. 0:00 Now what? What do you actually want to do with what you've made? 0:07 Maybe you've made an app, and you want to sell it. 0:11 Great. Or you've made a website, and you've put the copyright notices on it, and you're all set. 0:13 Awesome. But have you ever given serious thought to sharing what you've done with the world? 0:18 I don't mean just making the website live, I mean really sharing your work. Free as in freedom. 0:24 First of all, let's not confuse the idea of sharing with the idea of giving away. 0:32 Those terms get used interchangeably sometimes, and they're really different things. 0:37 Creative Commons licenses make it easy to share your creative works with the rest of the world in a clear, concise way. 0:43 But with Creative Commons, it's also clear that the work is still yours. 0:50 You're not giving anything away. 0:54 This isn't a gift you're not going to get back like giving a copy of your favorite video game to a friend. 0:57 You're letting that friend borrow the game with an understanding that they won't break it, scratch it, 1:02 or give it to anybody else and that they'll give it back to you when they're done. 1:06 That's licensing, and that's also sharing. 1:09 You've got to ask yourself why you're making what you're making. 1:14 If your priority is to make something that you're going to sell 1:19 then by all means don't share that app freely. 1:22 Make people pay for subscriptions to your site, whatever it might be. 1:25 Sell your songs or your movie. That's totally fine. 1:28 But are you starting a blog where you express your opinions about web design? 1:32 Is that font you've been working on something that you want to sell, 1:36 or do you just want people to use it? 1:38 Sharing really does have advantages. Sometimes they're monetary. 1:41 I mean you can make an app and put it in the app store and sell it for $1, and maybe people will buy it, 1:46 but you make that app free, and that download count is going to skyrocket. 1:52 So do you want to make money, or do you want the attention? 1:56 Look at CSS-Tricks. We talk a lot about Chris Coyier and CSS-Tricks here at Treehouse. 1:59 He's a buddy of the site, and we love him, but look at what he's doing. 2:05 Here's the license agreement for CSS-Tricks. 2:09 Chris says, and I quote, "I don't give two hoots what you do with any of the design or code you find here. 2:12 Actually, I do. I hope you take it and use it, uncredited, on a super commercial website and get wicked rich off it." 2:20 So there it is. There's all the licensing terms we needed to understand in 3 really funny sentences. 2:28 So how does CSS-Tricks make any money or even support their hosting costs? 2:36 Well they sell ads. Seeing ads for a bit so that I can get some great CSS code for my site seems like a fair trade-off to me. 2:40 Chris makes money by sharing what he does so freely. 2:48 CSS-Tricks really does sharing and licensing so well. 2:52 It's easy to find that license on the site, and it's easy to read and understand. 2:56 If you want to share something, it's just a matter of licensing your work properly and clearly. 3:00 You make it easy for people to find out that your work can be shared in the first place. 3:06 You can include a license on your website or your app or whatever you've made as well. 3:11 Remember there's no specific way a license has to be written, so just as long as you include all the things that are important to you. 3:16 Do you want to share your work but only as long as it's not being used by somebody commercially? 3:22 Say that. 3:27 Do you only want to make your work free for people named Fred? Do it. 3:30 Just be clear about it and make it easy to find. 3:34 You probably don't even need to do all that work yourself though if sharing is your goal. 3:37 Creative Commons is far and away the easiest way to freely share your work on the Internet at the moment. 3:41 Every one of those licenses includes attribution. That's credit. 3:49 That's crucial for most artists. 3:52 No matter how much you're sharing something, your name is still attached to it. 3:55 You're still retaining that authorship. 4:00 Sharing your work freely can actually be a great way to make a name for yourself in your chosen field. 4:02 But if you don't require that attribution, nobody's going to know you made it in the first place. 4:08 Creative Commons has a really simple tool on their website that you can use to both pick a license 4:14 and display that license in your project. 4:19 You can click on licenses at the top of the Creative Commons homepage, 4:22 and then choose choose a license. 4:26 It will ask you a couple of simple questions, and then the license will update based on your answers. 4:29 From there you fill out some info about your creation, and there you go. 4:35 You've got an embed code you can easily add to your website that displays everything people need to know, 4:39 and that link, when someone clicks it, takes them to a really easy-to-read and understand page outlining the license. 4:45 The work's already been done for you. 4:53 Creative Commons is easy to use, and more and more people are learning about it every day, 4:55 but you do what you want to with your work. 5:00 You share it however you want. 5:03 Chris Coyier does it his way. You can do it yours. 5:05 But take a second and really think about some of those things that you've made or that you're working on right now. 5:08 What's the point? Why are you doing it? 5:13 Would sharing be something that you could benefit from 5:17 and that would benefit the work you're creating? 5:19 Would sharing it be not just beneficial to you but to the millions of people out there who could potentially use it? 5:22 Do some soul searching. 5:28 I think you might be surprised at how you end up feeling. 5:31 Before we move on, there's just one thing about sharing your work that you need to understand. 5:34 Once you share your work, once you pick that license, whether it's homemade or Creative Commons or GPL 5:39 or whatever it is, you can't take it back. 5:46 Think about WordPress. 5:49 What would happen if they decided that WordPress was no longer GPL licensed? 5:52 It was all rights reserved, no one could modify WordPress anymore, no more free themes, shut the community down. 5:56 That's crazy, and it's not fair. 6:03 I may not have signed a piece of paper when I downloaded WordPress, but we had a license agreement. 6:06 That was clear. They can't make that more restrictive. 6:11 The GPL doesn't allow it. 6:15 Neither does Creative Commons. 6:17 You can get more permissive, you could have an attribution non-commercial license 6:19 and change it to just plain attribution if you wanted to removing those commercial restrictions, 6:24 but you can't just add them back, and you can't expect people who've licensed the work previously 6:30 to have to live by the new rules. 6:36 That's like giving your friend that video game for his birthday, and then calling him a week later and asking for it back. 6:38 It's not cool. 6:43 So when you pick a license of any kind for your work, especially one that encourages sharing, 6:45 definitely give it some thought first. 6:50 Sharing is a wonderful thing. The Internet could not exist without it. 6:53 But changing your mind later on and trying to take it all back just isn't possible. 6:56