“Creative Commons (cc) is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
Copyright adheres to a work at the moment of its creation if it qualifies. Of course, proving the work is yours and enforcing your rights are a completely different discussion. Other than fair use, anyone who wishes to make use of a work is legally required to get permission from its creator or copyright holder. What Creative Commons has done is create 6 basic licenses (7 if you include the Public Domain license) which tell the public what uses of the work are allowed and therefore what rights are retained, without the copyright holder being contacted for specific permission.
To communicate these licenses they have created a number of symbols the most obvious of these symbols is (cc) . This symbol lets everybody know there is a license. The complete set of symbols can be found in the Creative Commons font available here: http://creativecommons.org/about/downloads
This is how I see it working. I put an image on the web with a (cc) symbol attached. I want people to see my work. I want them to use it and share it and enjoy it. Number 1, I can’t stop them from spreading it around and Number 2, its my marketing. I mean it would be nice if something I did went viral. But I am not giving it away. I am putting my work out there under a class 5 license (cc)(5).
(I indexed the licenses because it made sense to me. See below.)
The (cc)(5) says: I want attribution; No commercial use is allowed; Derivative work is allowed but only if it it is licensed in kind. In other words, people know without getting ahold of me that they can use the work if they give me credit. They can’t make money off it with out getting (and probably paying for) permission from me. If they build on something I have done, they must license the work in the same way mine is licensed unless they have my permission to do otherwise. If I have anything wrong, someone please enlighten me. You can view the licenses here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
I think this is great stuff.
But as an aside, I have to say that I am finding HTML a terrific pain in the ass to do straight forward wordprocessing/typesetting with. It seems obvious that it was created by computer geeks and not by poets no matter all the crap about “code is poetry.” Why someone hasn’t created a widgit/plugin for WordPress that allows for simple carriage returns instead of <p> break forced spacing (I can always add another carriage return if I want space between paragraphs) and allows a tab key for indentation, I don’t know. A little help here folks. Or is it beyond the coding capacity of the language? And to get back on topic, it would be nice to be able to type in the (cc) symbol or have it transfer from a wordprocessing draft.
I sent an @mail to Creative Commons which included the above image. Here is my @mail and their reply.
I have numbered (indexed) the 6 licenses as shown below. I have done this because we want to unobtrusively visually label textual images we will be publishing (see example).
My reasoning is this: 1) The ‘text’ labels are less obtrusive than your icons; 2) Most people would not know what your icons or our text labels mean with out looking them up; 3) The text labels could provide an easier way for people to look up the meaning (i.e. cc(1), cc(2)….).
Please let me know if you think this is a bad idea. We will probably not be going live for about a month.
Also it seems like it is past time for someone to put together a little widget to make the available as a typeable character with keystrokes to do so. As © is.
I don’t know how to do it but I know it can be done and have added it to my to do list. My feelings would not be hurt if some one got to it before me.
We truly appreciate your work and hope our use can help contribute to your growth.
Thank you,
Bob Brown
Perseveration, Inc
Nathan Kinkade nkinkade@creativecommons.org
12/26/11
to me, info
Hi Bob,
Textual labels are just fine. The images are convenient sometimes and
provide quick visual cues to people, but usually an icon and some text
together are better, and even just plain text is fine. It’s all about
being clear, and whatever you feel is most clear for your users is
best. We do have the license icons available in a true type font:
http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/presskit/cc-icons.ttf
That is found on this page:
http://creativecommons.org/about/downloads/
Best,
Nathan