Feb 19 2008
Licensing online
After thinking more about my previous post on Facebook and the hidden scary stuff in their terms I started looking into options for trying to protect the words and images I put on the Internet, or at least trying to control how they are used.
I have looked into Creative Commons licensing so I’ll share what I have learnt about it. There may be other options (and I’d be very interested to hear about them), but I will just cover Creative Commons for now.
I choose to be a part of the blogging community, which for me is all about “conversations” - I read something interesting or see something beautiful and I want to share it with other people I know. And I want people to feel like they can do the same with the content of my website, blog, etc. But I still want to have some control over how and where my words and images are used and I want to be recognised when my work is used somewhere else. Creative Commons gives you an easy way, as the creator, to communicate to others what uses you’re okay with.
Licensing your work with Creative Commons doesn’t affect your copyright. From the Creative Commons site:
“Offering your work under a Creative Commons license does not mean giving up your copyright. It means offering some of your rights to any member of the public but only on certain conditions.”
It’s a way of letting people know what types of use of your content you’re happy with, without them having to contact you for approval everytime they want to quote something from your site.
You can choose from a wide variety of licenses easily by checking a few boxes and clicking a button. You are then presented with code you can easily copy to your site that clearly tells people exactly what type of license you use. It also lets them click through to a very brief, easy-to-understand explanation (no lawyer-talk).
So the license I chose (you can see the details on my blog home page, over on the right) tells people I am happy for them to use my words and images so long as they attribute them to me, and that everything I do comes under the jurisdiction of New Zealand’s copyright laws.
Something else interesting I learnt is that if you are looking for images on Flickr to use on your own site/blog, you can search by the owners’ Creative Commons license. Just go to the Advanced Search and check the Creative Commons box. Too easy.
I’m new to using Creative Commons, and like anything else I think it will only stop the honest people, but it’s worth a try. What is your experience with it??
Disclaimer: I believe the above information to be correct, but I’m not a lawyer. Use at your discretion and please undertake your own investigations relevant to your situation.
