Creative Commons offers a legal alternative to extend copyright. It’s a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permission from individual creators to large companies and institutions as to their creative work. The Creative Commons licenses enable people to easily change their copyright terms from the default of “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.” Which promotes dispersal and sharing in ways that traditional copyright shuts down.

A Creative Commons license is based on copyright. So they apply to all works that are protected by copyright law like books, websites, blogs, photographs, films, videos, songs and other audio & visual recordings. 

It’s often mistaken as a fancy way to offer your work for free and precludes the ability to profit from your creative work.

But that depends on the license you choose to apply. For example, a noncommercial license option is an inventive tool designed to allow people to maximize the distribution of their works while keeping control of the commercial aspects of their copyright. The “noncommercial use” condition applies only to others who use your work, not to you (the licensor). 
So if you choose to license your work under a Creative Commons license that includes the “noncommercial use” option, you impose the ”noncommercial” condition on the users (licensees). However, you, the creator of the work and/or licensor, may at any time decide to use it commercially. Including drawing royalties. People who want to copy or adapt your work, “primarily for monetary compensation or financial gain” must get your separate permission first.

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CONTENT CREDIT: Extracted from The Digital Marketing Guidebook by Max Kaizen. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License[CC BY NC SA]. Shared education resources, use them too.
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CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Physicist turned Open and Collaborative Resources champion, Shuttleworth Fellow Dr Mark Horner is beyond busy.  Mark co-developed Free High School Science Text (FHSST)  in 2002. FHSST aims to provide free science and mathematics textbooks for Grades 10 to 12 science learners in South Africa. Mark and co-developer Sam Halliday were post-grad students at UCT when they struck on the idea of getting volunteers together to produce textbooks for the South Africa school system. With more volunteers then they could handle FHSST began. Siyavula Project, FullMarks and OpenPress all bridge off from FHSST. Siyavula Project is working to ensure that South African teachers have access to open licensed, sustainable curriculum. FullMarks allows gives educators some tools to help generate tests and analyse results.  Finally OpenPress is a crowsourcing project that works off the back of FHSST allowing schools purchase texts at reduced prices with collaborative purchasing.

This year Siyavula has been focusing on two things: Translations and Distribution. Recently they held another Afrikaans Translation Hackathon, a community event bring together bringing together the Afrikkans community to translate  You might think that asking people to give up a Saturday to translate a matric maths textbook  would be a tough sell but Horner says “people are desperate to help and to be part of making change, to making a difference.”  ”Our group shows up at 8:30, there is no chatter, no vibe just work, they work until 5pm, people just come here to work.” You can view their livefeed of the event here. Their output is tremendous and Mark is still bragging out their work months later.

Secondly they have been working on distribution. They decided to buy 12 hard drives for R10,000. They’ve loaded them with Kahn Academy videos, UCT data everything and anything a school teacher could use. Instead of shipping them blindly to schools to have them ignored by overworked teachers they have asked teachers to vote for a member of their peers to be the gatekeeper “the teacher is represented by their peers to hold the drive, share and distribute, this makes them responsible to their peers” Horner adds “this is so simple and might be the best thing we’ve done yet”.

Check out his 2010 Big Ideas Fest chat.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For more information on all Mark’s projects follow him at

markhorner.net

@marknewlyn

CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I fell in LOVE with Andre photography of the Western Cape, then I saw his pics of the Karoo and nearly died but when I discovered he’s a member of the CC tribe already, I loved him with heat of a 1000 suns. While it’s often easy to celebrate the famous CC stories it’s important to us remember that everyone’s journey to CC. I asked him to tell his CC journey, here’s his story.

Enjoy!
As a young boy, I got involved in my father’s pro-am photography. Dad supplemented his earnings (and bolstered his social calendar) in the Navy, by shooting weddings and similar functions, for his shipmates and others. I’d work in the darkroom, often spending my entire Sunday in the dark, churning out the prints of the photo’s that had been taken on Saturday, and had to be delivered on Monday. I didn’t get paid, but I got to use the big 35mm Zeiss Icarex with the 135mm tele-photo lens, with a couple of rolls of Ilford FP4 thrown in, when we went to motor-racing at the Killarney circuit, out past Milnerton.

I must have taken hundreds of photo’s over a 4-5 year period. And they covered a halcyon period in South Africa motor-racing. We were one of the only countries in the world, where our national championship was decided using the same formula cars as the WORLD championship! We raced Formula 1 cars, baby! And the photo’s were pretty good. I read a lot of motor-racing magazines back then, and learned my angles and composition from some of the best shooters in the racing world. Lots of practice helped. So did a parental review process filled with phrases like “I should give you the box Brownie instead…” and “waste of good film”…

So. Have you ever seen any of my photos from that period in the early 70′s? No? Sadly, the overwhelming chances are, you haven’t. Photos didn’t get anywhere near the audience back then. There was no internet, no Flickr. And AutoSport didn’t buy photo’s from young teenagers.

A couple of years ago, when the photography bug bit me once again, I was met by a completely transformed landscape. The Web 2.0 wave was just starting, and I was catapulted into a crazed rush of hundred of thousands of images being shared on sites like Flickr, every day. IT WAS GREAT! I was in there, posting pix like a madman, at full size, so that my contacts could view them LARGE! I’d selected the “ALL RIGHTS RESERVED” license, so no-one could steal them, right?

It soon became apparent that I hadn’t thought that through. One or two incidences of image-theft shocked me and my circle of Flickr friends into rethinking the whole sharing online idea. We certainly wanted to share our images, and we had creative reasons for disliking watermarks or small images, so what to do? I mean, the images were MINE, right? A treasured little hoard of faved and commented and invited photo’s that … sort of … described my … worth? as a photographer? In the eyes of my friends/followers/adoring fans?  In the mold of an Annie Liebowitz? Hunched over her precious hocked to-the-gills portfolio? Whoah. Hold up there, tiger! It suddenly became clear to me that I was in serious need of a re-calibration here. This didn’t feel good, it didn’t feel right.

So I did what I always do in cases like this. I started talking to people. Photographers, authors, musicians, open-source advocates. Let’s start throwing stuff at the wall, and see what sticks. Gather information, points of view. Discard nothing, consider it all… What rings true? My friend Paul, (big tall Paul, with a penchant for panoramas and millimetric repetitive processing accuracy) and I chewed it over, sitting round an open fire on his farm in the Little Karoo. Alan (who shoots a two and a quarter square Yashica Twin Lens Reflex with a ground glass focussing screen, with same aplomb as a 14-year old flashing a BlackBerry, but with vastly superior results) and I spent a cold early morning sharing coffee on the same farm, bouncing it back and forth. I read AJ’s blog (he who has read Torvalds and Stalman and thinks they both should shut up and listen to him) way too far back and pressed him with questions to test his certainty.
I talked and thought and tested and asked and challenged, wash, rinse, repeat.

So. What came out? What stuck? What do I believe now?
1. Hoarding a pile of your past achievements is just silly. Don’t do it. Set them free, brother!
2. Posting my images online allows me to share my passion with a far wider audience. Do this. A LOT.
3. My past images (as much as I may love them)  are just a bread-crumb trail which shows how I’ve learnt the craft. Our best images are yet to be taken. Let’s go take them.
4. I licence images that I share in this way (ie my entire Flickr collection now), with one of the many clever Creative Commons licenses. Share freely for Non-Commercial with NC. Let them go. They’ll be OK. Stop hanging onto the past. You’re better than that. Go make more beautiful pictures.
5. I don’t share customer photo’s online.

That’s it. That’s where I fetched up with what’s right and fair, and that I can live with. I sleep easier now. Hope it helps you to, as well.
Thanks for listening.

Andre
andre@andreinafrica.com

flickr.com/andreinafrica

@andrevr

Here is a small selection of Andre’s work. I suggest you check out his flickr page and view the images in full size for the complete expression of his work.

Heather Dowd - CC BY-SA 2.0

One of my favourite podcasts is This American Life (TAL) from National Public Radio in the US. It’s a one-hour weekly radio show hosted by the charming and highly crush worthily Ira Glass.

Recently TAL dedicated an entire episode to patents. Or more accurately to the disruptive nature of patents and patent trolls. US Patents were originally intended to support entrepreneurs but in their current state actually stifle creativity and innovation. With patent lawyers in the US estimating that just about anything invented now will violate current patents. Including toast or rather the thermal refreshing of bread. US Patent Number 6080436 issued in 2000. They estimate that 30% of US Patents are for things that have already been invented.

Head down the patent rabbit hole here

Audio: This American Life – When Patents Attack

Blog: Planet Money

Don’t worry if your Japanese isn’t up to speed, just select English in the upper right corner.

Click on the pic to discover how to get in on having your creative brilliance on display through the powerful CC community and most particularly, celebrating the freedom of open culture at the Global Summit in Warsaw in September 2011.
 
The deadline is narrow 22nd Aug 2011, Japan time. Does your genie move fast?! Point it in the direction of this competition and let’s rock some hot SA talent at this challenge >> 
Please ping us as well if you’re submitting so we can back your bid!
 

Creative Commons provides free-to-use legal tools to both protect your creative works as an artist, scientist, author or educator ..and to enhance its promotion on the Internet, and beyond.

“The infrastructure we provide consists of a set of copyright licenses and tools that create a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates.

Our tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to keep their copyright while allowing certain uses of their work — a “some rights reserved” approach to copyright — which makes their creative, educational, and scientific content instantly more compatible with the full potential of the internet. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law. We’ve worked with copyright experts around the world to make sure our licenses are legally solid, globally applicable, and responsive to our users’ needs.

If you’d like to see what kinds of companies and organizations are using Creative Commons licenses to realize the full potential of the Internet, visit our Who Uses CC? page.

For those creators wishing to opt out of copyright altogether, and to maximize the interoperability of data, Creative Commons provides tools that allow work to be placed as squarely as possible in the public domain.”

[http://creativecommons.org/about/]

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Featured Photo Credit: Iko on Flickr CC licensed BY NC ND

21st Century Copyright for Digital Citizens

The idea of universal access to research, education, and culture is made possible by the Internet, but our legal and social systems don’t always allow that idea to be realized. Copyright was created long before the emergence of the Internet, and can make it hard to legally perform actions we take for granted on the network: copy, paste, edit source, and post to the Web. The default setting of copyright law requires all of these actions to have explicit permission, granted in advance, whether you’re an artist, teacher, scientist, librarian, policymaker, or just a regular user. To achieve the vision of universal access, someone needed to provide a free, public, and standardized infrastructure that creates a balance between the reality of the Internet and the reality of copyright laws. That is just where Creative Commons comes in.

Feature Cover Photo Credit: Garry61 on Flickr CC BY SA [discover more at http://visionandimagination.com]

The Science Commons

“At Creative Commons, we believe scientific data should be freely available to everyone. We call this idea Open Data. Creative Commons legal tools can be used to make data and databases freely available. We’ve already had successful implementations in taxonomic, energy, genomics, disease research, geospatial, polar, and bilbiometric disciplines, and are providing guidance to funders, institutions, private foundations, governments, the corporate sector, and other stakeholders.”

Featured Photo Credit: AlexKess on Flickr CC license BY NC ND