Copyright in 2008: To Free or Not to Free

Creative Commons: Adding an extra step to your copyrighting process for 2008

In the past, copyrighting was all applications and postal mail. Today, there are many options for licensing your online content. The most popular these days for content that you are sharing online is a Creative Commons license.

According to Creative Commons, “Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.”

Who uses a Creative Commons license?

People who use this liberal license are dedicating their work to the public domain. Consider it the open source of copyrighting that will give you an extra boost in search engine rankings with a designated Creative Commons meta tag.

However, you have many options with their point-and-click tool, so you can license appropriately and determine what is public domain and what is commercial.

According to Creative Commons, licenses are expressed in three different formats: the Commons Deed (human-readable code), the Legal Code (lawyer-readable code); and the metadata (machine readable code).

As publishers, not everyone will find a Creative Commons license useful, in fact, possibly no publisher (except for bloggers) will be likely to use a CC license on all their work. Read the FAQ before deciding upon using Creative Commons. Technically, is not a replacement for your standard copyright, but an elaboration on the terms.

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What uses a Creative Commons license?

Books, scripts, websites, lesson plans, blogs and any other forms of writings; photographs and other visual images; films, video games and other visual materials; musical compositions, sound recordings and other audio works.

If you’re looking for the more traditional copyright process, read our Easy Way to Copyright your Website article. To read more about how publishers are using Creative Commons licenses, read these articles.

Share Your Work. Keep Your Rights: Why You Should Be Publishing Your Content With Creative Commons Licenses

Commons touch on rights – Information World Review

CNN To Release Debates Under Creative Commons

Creative Commons: A Great Concept I’ll Continue to Employ

cNet: Does Creative Commons free your content?

Using Creative Commons to Stop Scraping – PlagiarismToday