Creative+Commons

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What is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons is a **nonprofit** corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. They provide **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 media type="custom" key="5331935" align="left"

[[image:Ja.png align="left" link="http://cc.aljazeera.net/"]]Al Jazeera
In early 2009, Al Jazeera [|launched] a [|Creative Commons Repository]–a section of their website dedicated to posting videos under the CC Attribution license. These videos were shot in Gaza, highlighting the Israeli/Palestine conflict. Whereas most Western media had no access to the area, Al Jazeera was visibly present. More recently Al Jazeera launched [|Al Jazeera Blogs], a website featuring posts written by prominent journalists and correspondents from Al Jazeera television network, all released under a CC BY-NC-ND license.

[[image:Flickr.png align="left" link="http://www.flickr.com/"]]Flickr
Flickr was one of the first major online communities to incorporate Creative Commons licensing options into its user interface, giving photographers around the world the easy ability to share photos on terms of their choosing. As the Flickr community grew, so did the number of CC-licensed images, establishing Flickr as the Web’s single largest source of CC-licensed content. Flickr’s services have grown to include a [|CC image portal] and [|advanced CC search features], making the site one of world’s most useful resources for discovering creativity that is available for free and legal sharing, use, and remixing

[[image:Google.png align="left" link="http://www.google.com"]]Google
Google has utilized CC licenses in a variety of instances throughout their digital services. Either by [|enabling CC-search capabilities] through their main search engine, [|image search engine], and [|book search engine], or by allowing users to CC license their own [|content in Picasa], [|Google Knol], and documentation at Google Code. YouTube, which is Google-owned, has also used CC-licenses in their [|audio-swap program], allowing users to swap “All Rights Reserved” music for similar-sounding CC-licensed tracks, as well as enabling CC-licensing for select institutions.

[[image:9_inch_Nails.png align="left" link="http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8267"]]Nine Inch Nails
When Trent Reznor decided to shake up the music industry through a new distribution model, the Nine Inch Nails front-man used CC as an anchor point, [|releasing] the [|Grammy nominated] Ghosts I-IV under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

[[image:Metro.png align="left" link="http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm"]]OpenCourseWare
[|MIT OpenCourseWare] has been releasing its materials under a CC BY-NC-SA license since 2004. Today, MIT OCW has over 1900 courses available freely and openly online for anyone, anywhere to adapt, translate, and redistribute. For more on MIT and OCW, see “[|OCW as a transition to college]” and “[|Two MIT OCW Courses Reach Million Visit Milestone].” The OpenCourseWare concept has now spread to [|dozens of universities worldwide].

[[image:Library.png align="left" link="http://www.plos.org/"]]PLOS
Open Access journals are a key component to the knowledge sharing cycle in scholarly communication. There are a number of journals that are leading the way in ensuring and enabling the sharing and reuse of scholarly content, most notably the [|Public Library of Science] (PLoS), [|BioMed Central], and [|Hindawi]. All PLoS content is published under a Creative Commons Attribution license – the freest license in the Creative Commons suite, and also in compliance with the definition of [|Open Access].

[[image:wikipedia.png align="left" link="http://wikipedia.org/"]]Wikipedia
Wikipedia [|recently migrated] its licensing structure from the GNU Free Documentation License to a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. The world’s largest and most cited collaborative encyclopedia made this move via a [|community vote] and for [|good reason]. By changing to a CC BY-SA license, Wikipedia (and the entire collection of Wikimedia sites) allows content to legally flow in and out of the site with ease, enabling one of the great cultural resources of the digital revolution to legally interact with an endless array of similar cultural institutions.



Whitehouse.gov
The Obama Administration has used Creative Commons licenses in a variety of ways, from [|licensing presidential campaign photos], [|releasing information] on transition site Change.gov via a CC Attribution license, to requiring that third-party content posted on Whitehouse.gov be [|made available] via CC Attribution Only as well. The US Government’s stance on openness is unsurprising, as its CTO, Aneesh Chopra, has [|gone on record] stating that CC licenses have directly informed his perspective on how intellectual property should be accessed, shared, and reused—not to mention derived, adapted, and remixed.

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The Licenses




History
Founded in 2001 with the generous support of the [|Center for the Public Domain], CC is led by a Board of Directors that includes cyberlaw and intellectual property experts [|Michael Carroll], [|Molly Shaffer Van Houweling], and [|Lawrence Lessig], MIT computer science professor [|Hal Abelson], lawyer-turned-documentary filmmaker-turned-cyberlaw expert [|Eric Saltzman], renowned documentary filmmaker [|Davis Guggenheim], noted Japanese entrepreneur [|Joi Ito], and educator and journalist [|Esther Wojcicki].

Creative Commons’ first project
In December 2002, Creative Commons released its first set of [|copyright licenses] for free to the public. Creative Commons developed its licenses — [|inspired in part] by the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) — alongside a Web application platform to help you license your works freely for certain uses, on certain conditions; or dedicate your works to the public domain. In the years following the initial release, Creative Commons and its licenses have grown at an exponential rate around the world. The licenses have been further improved, and ported to over 50 [|international jurisdictions].

Science Commons
[|Science Commons] was [|launched in 2005], under the guidance of [|John Wilbanks] and his team located at MIT. Science Commons designs strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web-enabled scientific research. Identifying and lowering unnecessary barriers to research, craft policy guidelines and legal agreements, and developing technology to make research, data and materials easier to find and use.

ccLearn
[|ccLearn] is a division of Creative Commons, launched in 2007 and led by [|Ahrash Bissell], dedicated to realizing the full potential of the internet to support open learning and open educational resources. With a mission to minimize legal, technical, and social barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials, ccLearn is developing brand new tools to integrate Creative Commons into open education.

2008 and on
In 2008, Lawrence Lessig [|stepped down as CEO and chairman] of Creative Commons. Joi Ito replaced him as CEO, with James Boyle taking over as board chair. [|Caterina Fake] also [|joined the board]. In 2009, Esther Wojcicki [|became board chair].

How to license your own work
It's easy, Creative Commons allows for a simple system that allows for one to copyright their work just with the click of a button. Click [|here] to license your work today.

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All info thanks to []