Creative Commons: Copyright, Schmopyright!

Copyright, licensing, and Creative Commons–three things I knew very little (read: nothing) about until this module. According to the article What We Do, Creative Commons’ mission is to offer free licenses that let creators decide the terms under which others can use their content, whether for non-commercial use, with attribution, or even with modifications or “remixes” allowed. These licenses are used for books, websites, blogs, photographs, films, videos, songs, and other audio and visual recordings.

Creative Commons offers an impressive six types of license options with different levels of attribution and permission. What surprised me the most was the simplicity of gaining copyright protection through Creative Commons. You can just slap something like “© 2023. This work is openly licensed via CC BY 4.0” on your content and BOOM–you’re copyrighted. I always assumed creators who wished to have a copyright had to navigate a process similar to that of getting a patent.

Sidenote: How can we better protect intellectual and artistic property? Although we can copyright our work, nobody is policing its usage.

Creative Commons in the library

This course has made me more conscious about giving proper credit to content creators, especially while building my district’s new library media center website. I never thought to use royalty-free image websites like Pixabay and Unsplash. I know, I know. Another assumption of mine was that royalty-free stock photography websites were only for “real” creators, whatever that means. 🤦🏻‍♀️

Creative Commons will impact the way I teach and require image citations. After reading the article Step 7: Images, Copyright, And Creative Commons from The Teacher Challenge, I bookmarked the Photos for Class website to share on my new library media center website and in my quarterly newsletter, coming out in November. Hopefully, it will encourage teachers to use it when requiring images or other media for their projects.

Am I cool enough for this?

In theory, I’d gladly share my work through Creative Commons. Though I can’t help but wonder if anyone out there is interested in my *checks phone* 697 photos of my cats. These days, I haven’t been snapping any pictures that are quite cool or intriguing enough to warrant the effort of copyrighting.

But just for the fun of it, feel free to enjoy these copyrighted images of my cats. They’re cool enough in my book!

“Margo in her “Barbie” blanket” by Laurel Erickson is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. © 2023.

 

“Olive splooting” by Laurel Erickson is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. © 2023.