Have you ever found yourself working on a presentation and wondered if all the media you were using was in copyright compliance? Are you constantly looking for copyright free media to use in presentations? Have you ever had to go back into your personal archives to delete and destroy materials on which the fair use rights have expired? (I really hate when that happens.) If all of this has happened to you, you should be looking into media given a Creative Commons license. Content placed under a Creative Commons (CC) license lacks the heavy restrictions that accompany the standard copyright license.
There are 4 conditions that can (but don't necessarily) accompany a CC license:
There are 4 conditions that can (but don't necessarily) accompany a CC license:
- Attribution - You must attribute the content that you are using to the original creator. (Basically include citations.)
- No Derivative Works - You must use the work as a whole in its entirety without alteration. (You can include a picture under CC in your powerpoint, but you cannot alter or crop it or change it in any way.)
- Share-A-Like - Anything that you create that includes content under this CC license must also be placed under a CC license. (This spreads the meme.)
- No Commercial Use - You can use the CC content however you like as long as it is not for a commercial purpose.
Now that you have an idea of what Creative Commons is, let me give you some ideas of how you can put this to work for you. There are three sites that specifically speak to the need for media with lenient restrictions.
- flickr.com - Flickr is a social photo sharing site that allows you to place creative commons licenses on your photos. You can then search the site for everybody's photos that have a specific license that you need. Need a photo of the Great Wall of China? There are 150 of them under the attribution only license! Great for powerpoint presentations and anything else that uses pictures. I find that the pictures on flickr tend to be of higher quality than those found at Google Images and you don't have to worry about copyright.
- The Free Sound Project - The Freesound Project is a database of sound effects and music loops that are all under a Creative Commons license. This resource is great for putting together narratives, radio plays and even adding a few sound effects to a powerpoint. (Warning: Some of the sounds are saved in a format called FLAC. You need some extra software to convert these sounds into something usable by another program. Don't worry, there are FLAC converters that are Open Source!)
- ccMixter - "ccMixter is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons, where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want." (ccMixter, http://ccmixter.org/ accessed Feb. 5, 2007)
Now that you have some idea what Creative Commons is you may ask yourself, "How can I help spread the word?" Educate your students and make sure that they know the difference between copyrighted media and Creative Commons media, and make sure they understand that media under a CC license gives them freedom and flexibility to do what they want. Copyright does not.
