Creative Commons is a nonprofit organisation that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. Creative Commons facilitates the use of 6 free-to-use copyright licenses. These standardised copyright licenses are easy to use and understand, and give the public permission to share creative work on variable conditions of their choice. Thus, with Creative Commons, its not always a case of “All Rights Reserved”: by choosing one of six Creative Commons or CC licences, you can choose to make “Some Rights Reserved”.
Creative Commons, headquartered in Mountain View, USA, and started in 2001, is devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for people to build upon legally and share. Currently, Over 500 million resources online are CC licensed.
Tobias Schonwetter, a German copyright specialist currently based in South Africa, is a key member of Creative Commons South Africa. Tobias was present at the #OpenAfrica14 training course and spoke to the participating delegates about Creative Commons. Tobias explained the various options available for licensing content and how Creative Commons does not get in the way of creators. In fact, Creative Commons is not an alternative to copyright laws in different countries, but allows creators to share their creations any way they want.
Throughout his presentation, Tobias emphasised how sharing content under the Creative Commons license can be a great way of allowing a creator to share creations or works as widely as possible, whilst still retaining the work’s first source through attribution.
Creative Commons has a strong relationship with its affiliate South Africa programme that began in 2011. Creative Commons South Africa wishes to use their presence in the country to focus on universities, software programmers, media geeks, musicians, authors, publishers, and marketers.
One core focus for South Africa is to support interested organisations or website owners in sharing their content using the Creative Commons 3.0 license, which contains many improvements over the 2.5 version.
Read Wikipedian-in-Residence Erina Mukuta’s experience of the Creative Commons discussion.
To license your content using Creative Commons, there are six options to choose from. Get a license today from the Creative Commons website and share your content with “Some Rights Reserved”.