Leveraging open source content
 

Editor’s Note: On the Web, content is king. We know that already. We also know that it can be expensive to produce (or acquire) and hard to protect. That’s why some very web-savvy legal eagles from Stanford and Harvard developed Creative Commons (CC), a sort of open-source aggregator for content. CC allows you to use others’ content and share your own, for free, provided you adhere to their straightforward terms and conditions. CC’s Eric Steuer talks about what CC is, how it works, and how publishers can benefit.

A big part of my job at Creative Commons is answering people’s questions: What is Creative Commons? How does it work? Why would I want to use it?

What it is
The basic idea is this: Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization dedicated to expanding the amount of creative work available for free and legal use by the public. We provide copyright licenses that anyone can use—for free—to let the world know which parts of their copyright they are happy to give up. When you create something—from a photo to a song to a movie—you automatically own an “all rights reserved” copyright to your creativity. Creative Commons licenses are an easy way to refine your copyright so that it’s “some rights reserved.” For instance, if you wrote an article and want people to be able to re-post it on their blog—as long as they don’t alter what you have written and aren’t making money from your work, you could use one type of Creative Commons license. Or if you shot some video footage that you’re happy for people to be able to mash up, sample from, or otherwise remix—even for commercial purposes—you could use a different CC license.

How it works
It’s easy to get a Creative Commons license. You just come to CreativeCommons.org, answer a few questions—like whether you want people to be able to make money from your work, and whether you want people to be able to make derivatives/remixes of your work—and we’ll generate some code that you simply paste onto your Web site to let people know which freedoms you want your work to carry.

One important thing to understand about Creative Commons is that we’re not trying to keep people from being able to make money from their work. Instead, we want people to be able to decide, easily and without having to always involve costly lawyers, how they want their creativity to be accessed and used by the world.

Why you should care
In many cases, CC licenses actually help people profit financially from their work. For instance, say you took a really cool photo of a castle in Edinburgh, then put it on Flickr under a CC license that indicates that people may freely and legally make noncommercial copies of your picture—as long as they always credit you as the photographer, and as long as they understand that if they want to make commercial uses, they must still come to you for permission. Then imagine that a popular blogger who is writing a post about Edinburgh searches Flickr for an image to help illustrate a point she is making—she finds your photo, uses it on her blog, and credits you as the photographer. She happens to use a CC license for her blog in order to enhance its visibility; she knows that many people use Yahoo!’s Creative Commons-restricted content search to find material that is available for free and legal use under certain terms. Finally, imagine that a commercial publisher who is doing research for a book he is putting together about Scotland uses Yahoo! to find relevant information. He lands on the blog post about Edinburgh, sees your outstanding photo, and, deciding that he must have it for his book, contacts you to discuss a commercial licensing deal.

In short, by freeing up your work to be used by people for noncommercial purposes, you’ve made it easier for other people with commercial interests to find your creativity.

Resources

Yahoo! is a terrific ally of CC and has amazing tools that publishers can use to find Creative Commons-licensed content to add to your site:

Add Creative Commons photos from Flickr to your site
Flickr is a hugely popular online photo management and sharing application that lets you browse and search for images published under Creative Commons licenses. Using Flickr, you can find millions of high-quality photos that you can legally use on your site, depending on which CC license they are subject to.

Yahoo! Search: Creative Commons Search
Similarly, Yahoo! Search can help you find text, music, images, and video across the Web offered under Creative Commons licenses. Please follow the individual license restrictions for each piece of content that you find.

—Eric Steuer, Creative Director, Creative Commons