A primer on copyright and Creative Commons

Copyright and Creative Commons Explained by Common Craft can be very useful in helping students understand why they cannot simply copy and paste whatever images they like that they find online. (from Free Technology for Teachers)

What can and cannot be used and how....Creative Commons licenses describe just how material an individual creates can be used by others. And there's some interesting and important information on this topic at Free Technology for Teachers.

Video competition announced

Creative Commons, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Open Society Institute have launched the Why Open Education Matters Video Competition. The competition will award cash prizes for the best short videos that explain the use and promise of free, high-quality Open Educational Resources (OER) and describe the benefits and opportunities these materials create for teachers, students and schools. (from the Creative Commons website)

To learn more, click the above hyperlinked text.

What is Creative Commons?

The idea of universal access to research, education, and culture is made possible by the Internet, but our legal and social systems don’t always allow that idea to be realized. Copyright was created long before the emergence of the Internet, and can make it hard to legally perform actions we take for granted on the network: copy, paste, edit source, and post to the Web. The default setting of copyright law requires all of these actions to have explicit permission, granted in advance, whether you’re an artist, teacher, scientist, librarian, policymaker, or just a regular user. To achieve the vision of universal access, someone needed to provide a free, public, and standardized infrastructure that creates a balance between the reality of the Internet and the reality of copyright laws. That someone is Creative Commons.

What is a Creative Commons license?

The Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools forge a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates. Our tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law.


To learn more about the Creative Commons, click either of the blocks of hyperlinked text above.