What is a Creative Commons License?

With so much business being conducted online these days, it has become imperative to have methods to protect and copyright our works in a manner just as remote as how it was posted. Regardless of whether your work is writing, photography, or even coding or programming, you will want a means to ensure that regardless of what happens with those items, you are given credit for producing them.

When you apply for a Creative Commons license you can keep the copyright to your work, while allowing others to copy or distribute you work, as long as they give you proper credit, on the conditions you get to specify. You may choose to offer your work freely with no desire for crediting, or you may determine exactly the manner in which you want to be credited regardless of its use.

There are some more reputable websites that can help you to create your licensing for your work.

CreativeCommons.org  is an example of a reputable licensing site. You are able to choose a license and once done they will provide you with an HTML tag that will list your work as copyright restricted. However, CreativeCommons is not a registrar and will not retain records of your selections.

Flickr.com also offers create commons licensing and the format to help you protect your work. Flickr and CreativeCommons both have things in common. Their licensing types mirror one another perfectly.

CreativeCommons offers the following licensing options.

• Attribution: An attribution license will let others tweak, change, build on, remix, distribute or otherwise alter your work, they also have to credit you for the original creation in the manner you request.
• Attribution NoDerivatives: This particular license allows for commercial and non-commercial use, as well as redistribution, however, it must remain unchanged and all credit must go to you.
• Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike: Like Attribution, users can tweak, alter, build on and distribute, however, they must credit you and license their own product or creation under identical terms.
• Attribution ShareAlike: An attribution sharealike license will allow others to alter, tweak and otherwise build upon your original work for commercial purposes. They must however, credit you and license their own agreement under the same terms.
• Attribution NonCommercial: Others can tweak, alter, rebuild or build upon your work for non-commercial purposes. Any new works should acknowledge the original creator and also be non-commercial.
• Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives: The most restrictive license, this one only allows others to download or otherwise save your works and even share them with others as long as you are properly credited. This license does not permit users to alter your original creation in any way.

If you are new to creative commons licensing it may be important to read up before making the decision on your license choices.

This is also likely to be one part of your copyright policy and protection practices, an example of how this is used as part of a policy or image see: Copyright Info

Sources:

• Creative Commons
• Flickr: Creative Commons
• New Media Rights
• Top Rank Blog: Creative Commons License Marketing Tool