So I was introduced to Flickr actually last semester in ProfessoMcCarthy’s Lit. Journal class where you design and run your own online literary journal.

In creating our own website essentially, my teammates and I sometimes needed more than just the artwork that we were provided by our contributors to spice up our site. This lead us to the wonderful Creative Commons section of Flickr.

Here is what Creative Commons has to say about itself:

Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons licenses free of charge to the public. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy to understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Creative Commons licenses do not replace copyright, but are based upon it. They replace individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, which are necessary under an “all rights reserved” copyright management with a “some rights reserved” management employing standardized licenses for re-use cases where no commercial compensation is sought by the copyright owner. The result is an agile, low overhead and cost copyright management regime, profiting both copyright owners and licensees. Wikipedia and Flickr are using its licenses.

Essentially CC works as a collaborative effort between artists (or non-artists if you’re like me) who share their work on some social media site, and agree to allow others to certain legal rights of sharing. These rights can be expanded to all: attribution, derivatives, commercial, or to any varying degrees.

The beauty is really creating a legal sharing space for work instead of setting up the web for illegal stealing of other people’s work.

I have been using Flickr’s CC search since last semester and find it an amazing resource. I think it is a brilliant way to make sure the web becomes a more collaborative effort rather than an individual one.