Creative Commons: What’s your flavor?

It’s the middle of Open Access Week, and terms and acronyms are abound. One term that many people find confusing is Creative Commons. Here is a brief tour of Creative Commons licenses and how they can help you.

According to the Creative Commons website (creativecommons.org), Creative Commons (CC) licenses are a way to give others some rights to work you have created, but still keep some control. For instance, if you create something (short story, comic, poem, photograph, drawing) you own the rights (copyright) to that creation. If you want to share it with others and allow them to use it and even modify it for their purposes, you can use CC licenses. Because there are so many options for allowing specific rights, there are many ‘flavors’ of CC.The least restrictive license is CC BY .   This license lets others use, change and share your work even for commercial purposes. Some of the restrictions you can put on your license is to prevent others from using the work commercially (CC BY-NC)   or to prevent others from changing the work (CC BY-ND) .
Read more about copyright and Creative Commons on the Copyright Research Guide and stop by the Library today at 1 PM today to learn about “Copyright, Author Rights, and Creative Commons.” (There will even be Open Access Cookies.)

Photo by Micky**  licensed CC BY