Okay, I’ve always seen the little ‘CC’ symbol on a lot of things, but never really thought to research and see what it’s about.

First off, I want to say that I think that it’s amazing that ANYONE can license their work, and for free.  I figured that something like that would cost money.  I’m truly amazing to see that it doesn’t (depending on what you are trying to license).

http://creativecommons.org/ is where I spent most of my time looking at information about CC and what it really is.  To be honest, I never even knew what the CC stood for.  I figured that it had something to do with copyright and that large corporations handled the majority of all that.  I learned from the website that creative commons is more or less a way for anyone on the web to share what they create with the rest of the web but prevent someone from selling their work.  It’s really built around people that enjoy the idea of sharing and collaborating but do not agree with things that people create being stolen.

It’s actually a rather brilliant idea and I’ll probably be doing this a lot to my own work over the course of the semester and outside of the classroom as well.  I was looking at the information here and it really breaks it down nicely for you.  You can choose which type of license you want and what the license is for.  It’s so simple to set up and I really think it would benefit a lot of people that are hesitant with putting any sort of material on the web that they don’t want sold or distributed without being properly credited for it.

In all, Creative Commons seems like a very sound way for people on the internet to distribute their work and not have to worry about someone else trying to sell it and make a profit off if it.  With digital artwork becoming more accessible, it seems like protecting yourself is the way to go.  I love Creative Commons for the fact that people that license through them are willing and actually WANTING other people to use their work.  They WANT their work seen.  They WANT people to be inspired by what they create.  They just want to make sure that they are the ones getting credit for the piece and not someone else.