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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.

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Now what? What do you actually want to do with what you've made?

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Maybe you've made an app, and you want to sell it.

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Great. Or you've made a website, and you've put the copyright notices on it, and you're all set.

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Awesome. But have you ever given serious thought to sharing what you've done with the world?

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I don't mean just making the website live, I mean really sharing your work. Free as in freedom.

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First of all, let's not confuse the idea of sharing with the idea of giving away.

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Those terms get used interchangeably sometimes, and they're really different things.

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Creative Commons licenses make it easy to share your creative works with the rest of the world in a clear, concise way.

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But with Creative Commons, it's also clear that the work is still yours.

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You're not giving anything away.

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This isn't a gift you're not going to get back like giving a copy of your favorite video game to a friend.

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You're letting that friend borrow the game with an understanding that they won't break it, scratch it,

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or give it to anybody else and that they'll give it back to you when they're done.

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That's licensing, and that's also sharing.

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You've got to ask yourself why you're making what you're making.

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If your priority is to make something that you're going to sell

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then by all means don't share that app freely.

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Make people pay for subscriptions to your site, whatever it might be.

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Sell your songs or your movie. That's totally fine.

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But are you starting a blog where you express your opinions about web design?

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Is that font you've been working on something that you want to sell,

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or do you just want people to use it?

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Sharing really does have advantages. Sometimes they're monetary.

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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,

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but you make that app free, and that download count is going to skyrocket.

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So do you want to make money, or do you want the attention?

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Look at CSS-Tricks. We talk a lot about Chris Coyier and CSS-Tricks here at Treehouse.

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He's a buddy of the site, and we love him, but look at what he's doing.

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Here's the license agreement for CSS-Tricks.

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Chris says, and I quote, "I don't give two hoots what you do with any of the design or code you find here.

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Actually, I do. I hope you take it and use it, uncredited, on a super commercial website and get wicked rich off it."

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So there it is. There's all the licensing terms we needed to understand in 3 really funny sentences.

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So how does CSS-Tricks make any money or even support their hosting costs?

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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.

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Chris makes money by sharing what he does so freely.

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CSS-Tricks really does sharing and licensing so well.

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It's easy to find that license on the site, and it's easy to read and understand.

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If you want to share something, it's just a matter of licensing your work properly and clearly.

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You make it easy for people to find out that your work can be shared in the first place.

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You can include a license on your website or your app or whatever you've made as well.

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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.

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Do you want to share your work but only as long as it's not being used by somebody commercially?

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Say that.

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Do you only want to make your work free for people named Fred? Do it.

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Just be clear about it and make it easy to find.

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You probably don't even need to do all that work yourself though if sharing is your goal.

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Creative Commons is far and away the easiest way to freely share your work on the Internet at the moment.

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Every one of those licenses includes attribution. That's credit.

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That's crucial for most artists.

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No matter how much you're sharing something, your name is still attached to it.

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You're still retaining that authorship.

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Sharing your work freely can actually be a great way to make a name for yourself in your chosen field.

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But if you don't require that attribution, nobody's going to know you made it in the first place.

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Creative Commons has a really simple tool on their website that you can use to both pick a license

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and display that license in your project.

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You can click on licenses at the top of the Creative Commons homepage,

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and then choose choose a license.

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It will ask you a couple of simple questions, and then the license will update based on your answers.

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From there you fill out some info about your creation, and there you go.

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You've got an embed code you can easily add to your website that displays everything people need to know,

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and that link, when someone clicks it, takes them to a really easy-to-read and understand page outlining the license.

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The work's already been done for you.

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Creative Commons is easy to use, and more and more people are learning about it every day,

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but you do what you want to with your work.

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You share it however you want.

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Chris Coyier does it his way. You can do it yours.

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But take a second and really think about some of those things that you've made or that you're working on right now.

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What's the point? Why are you doing it?

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Would sharing be something that you could benefit from

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and that would benefit the work you're creating?

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Would sharing it be not just beneficial to you but to the millions of people out there who could potentially use it?

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Do some soul searching.

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I think you might be surprised at how you end up feeling.

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Before we move on, there's just one thing about sharing your work that you need to understand.

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Once you share your work, once you pick that license, whether it's homemade or Creative Commons or GPL

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or whatever it is, you can't take it back.

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Think about WordPress.

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What would happen if they decided that WordPress was no longer GPL licensed?

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It was all rights reserved, no one could modify WordPress anymore, no more free themes, shut the community down.

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That's crazy, and it's not fair.

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I may not have signed a piece of paper when I downloaded WordPress, but we had a license agreement.

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That was clear. They can't make that more restrictive.

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The GPL doesn't allow it.

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Neither does Creative Commons.

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You can get more permissive, you could have an attribution non-commercial license

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and change it to just plain attribution if you wanted to removing those commercial restrictions,

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but you can't just add them back, and you can't expect people who've licensed the work previously

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to have to live by the new rules.

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That's like giving your friend that video game for his birthday, and then calling him a week later and asking for it back.

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It's not cool.

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So when you pick a license of any kind for your work, especially one that encourages sharing,

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definitely give it some thought first.

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Sharing is a wonderful thing. The Internet could not exist without it.

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But changing your mind later on and trying to take it all back just isn't possible.