Recently in Creative Commons Category

This video does a good job at explaining why we should share what we're doing and then explains the next step.  A Creative Commons license lets you share your work the way you want it to be shared: free for all, no remixing, non-commercial use only, requiring others to share their remixed versions of your work, etc...  Good stuff -- and the video itself is an interesting demonstration of remixed media.

In the midst of putting together some resources for an Online Issues Forum presentation, I thought it would be interesting to discuss the elements of a Creative Commons license, so people would have a better idea of what the symbols mean and what they can do with those resources.  This page on the Creative Commons site is called "Meet the Licenses" and explains each of the combination of license provisions.  For example, the little person means that you need to give credit to the person who created the orginal media.  The dollar sign crossed out means that the media can only be used for noncommercial purposes. So is an educational institution noncommercial?  I found out that the noncommercial provision is being studied now and new guidelines will be released in 2009.  The old draft guidelines say that nonprofit educational institutions fall within noncommercial use.  However, if you modify the content and keep it behind a password, you may be violating other provisions, such as the "share alike" requirement (that's the little circular arrow icon.

At the 2008 Teaching and Learning with Technology Symposium, Lawrence Lessig (law professor, author, and founder of Creative Commons) came to Penn State to give his keynote presentation. He talked for about 45 minutes about current interpretation of copyright law, organizations like the RIAA and MPAA, examples of remixed media, and alternative licenses.