In my research on Creative Commons, I was surprised that I hadn’t heard of it. CC is a non-profit organization devoted to providing free and easy to use legal tools that work with copyright laws to reach the full potential of the internet. This enables anyone to share their work, while allowing other to use, share, and build upon the work.

I found that there are many fields in which CC can be used.

• Culture
  • Flickr
  • Google
• Science
  • Personal Genome Project
• Education
  • Open Courseware
  • P2PU
• Government
  • United States
  • Australia

Creative Commons allows someone to change the default copyright terms from “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.” They do this by several different licenses that are tailored to how you want others to use your work.

• Attribution
• Attribution-ShareAlike
• Attribution-NoDerivs
• Attribution-NonCommerical
• Attribution-NonCommerical-ShareAlike
• Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs

All licenses are based on attribution the original creator of the work. Certain licenses are based on being used by noncommercial purposes. While others are based on not being altered from the original. Learning about all the different licenses, in the future, I would choose to license under the Attribution License. It is the most open license and I have no qualms about allowing things I create being used commercially as long as I am credited for what they borrowed from my work.

In researching Creative Commons, I found that the two most useful websites were http://www.creativecommonsza.org/ and http://creativecommons.org/.