I know most of you are pretty web savvy, and you already know all about Creative Commons and the work they do. Feel free to skip this post. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this group, however, I wanted to take a step back and explain a few things. In the spirit of what the organization’s about, I’ll quote directly from their own About page:
Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.
We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.
The nuts and bolts of this is that, while I hold a copyright on all of the original content (text and photos) of this blog, I’m putting it out there under less stringent conditions than copyright law allows.
Thanks to the same license, we have that lovely picture at the very top of the page. I did not take that picture. Instead, I found it on flickr and noticed that the photographer, ixab, had released that image under a creative commons license, allowing me to use (and modify) the image.
So, for the record, all of the text content and all of the pictures on this website are released under a Creative Commons license (unless otherwise noted — by the way, that lovely Creative Commons license logo you see over to the left has been released by the organization under a CC license). More specifically, it is released under what’s called a BY-NC-SA-3.0 creative commons license. If you click on through, you can see the full deal of that license.
The basics are that you can share and modify the content on this website provided you attribute it to this website, you do not use any of the work for a commercial purpose, and you share any adaptations under the same Creative Commons license.
