GlitchNYC

The creative commons needs your help

October 31st, 2005

The Creative Commons is the group which makes artist and sharing friendly content licenses available for use free of charge. They do all the work of writing up the legalese and making sure the licenses benefit the artist and the public, leaving artists free to slap a CC license on their content and be clear about who can do what with it. For example, all the content that I’ve created here at GlitchNYC is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license.

What that means is that you’re free to use any CC-BY-SA content as you see fit (including commercially) as long as you give me attribution, and you release your work under the same license. There are other more and less restrictive licenses available at CreativeCommons.org, and the Creative Commons movement is truly helping artists make their work more available to anyone who wants to use it, without going through traditional big-media distribution channels like publishing houses and record labels. The clearly stated and easy to licenses also clear up many of the copyright complexities that face media creators today.

If a filmmaker is looking for a song for their nonprofit documentary, but has no budget to work with, where do they go? Today, thanks to the work of the Creative Commons teams, they can search for Creative Commons licensed songs on the web, and rest assured that they are free to use the song in their movie, providing they abide by the restrictions of that particular license, such as “non-commercial,” “Attribution,” and/or “ShareAlike.” The filmmaker might even be inspired to release their film under a Creative Commons license themselves, and keep the creative cycle flowing.

As noted on BoingBoing today the Creative Commons is asking for small donations from a large number of people to help them achieve nonprofit status in the eyes of the IRS. I’ve already made my contribution. If you like the work the Creative Commons is doing, contribute the small amount needed now to help them achieve their goal.