Creative Commons - how not to use CC

I now know first hand the most annoying thing someone who has used a Creative Commons license can do is to think they can change the type of license they have already applied.

Over 6 months ago I wrote a poem for a friend. At first I was just playing around with adding it to a photo to see how it could enhance the poem. The first image I picked looked great, even though I was not supposed to remix it due to the CC that had been applied. I therefore found a second image that I could remix and it actually turned out quite lovely. In the last week I decided to post that poem to my blog. However, when I looked up the photograph on flickr it seemed that photographer had changed their CC licence for all their photos to all rights reserved - WTF...

Maybe the most constructive thing would have been to message them and find out why they had made the change. I might have even been able to explain to them that such changes make life difficult for others and come to an agreement. Instead I searched and found a new image with the most open CC license available - Attribution only. To celebrate finding an image that is along the lines of the poem I have also applied the same license, even though I am not required to.

Check out the remix of the poem and photo here. However, I am not sure if this is exactly how I want it - so I may remix this again...

Lesson is - if you apply a CC license that lets others remix your work, it is not only rude to change that license, it also goes against the idea of CC. Once you have applied a license you cannot change it, so pick a license carefully!

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Creative Commons: answers to my ?s

I was just at the ALIA Information Online conference 2009 and I took the opportunity to seek answers to some of my questions I have about Creative Commons (CC). One of the speakers was Jessica Coates who is the Project Manager of Creative Commons Australia. Jessica was at IO2009 to talk about preserving digital objects, when the act of preservation may run into conflict with copyright, but I will not go into that in this post even though it was fascinating and Jessica did a fantastic job.

I spoke to Jessica about CC after her presentation. Now I want to place a "I may have heard this wrong" statement at this point. Please feel free to correct me if I get it wrong :)

Some of the questions I asked about CC are:

• Q: I now live in New Zealand but I am Australian so I have been using a Australian Creative Commons license. Was this the right thing to do?
  
• A: Pick the jurisdiction that you would want to take legal action in if someone else happened to ignore the CC license you have selected.
  
• For me that would be Australia
  

• Q: I have run into problems with my blog of poetry in that I want to mostly apply a CC BY-NC-SA license to most of my posts but there are a few poems I posted that I selected the option BY-ND. What should I do in this situation and will one licence make the other void?
  
• A: Place a statement on my blog along the lines that 'Most content falls under a BY-NC-SA unless otherwise stated on a post'.
• I intend to do this as soon as I get my act together :-)

• Q: I have made the choice of Non-Commercial (NC) for my blogs under CC. My thinking behind selecting NC was so that you the reader can copy, save, share, and remix (unless otherwise stated) most of my content but you can not then go and make money from it. Does this now mean I can not make money from what I have put under NC myself?
  
• A: I can make money but others can not

These questions have been on my mind for months and I have even posted about it in the past. It was great to finally have some answers and also some ideas of how to proceed from here. Thank you Jessica :-D

The other thing I have learned about CC from experience is that if you choose to use CC on your blog, especially if you are also feeding your posts to other places, it pays to place CC on each of the posts. This means that what others can do with the content always goes with the post and/or they then do not have to scroll to the bottom to realise that as a reader they have certain rights. I realise I have not been doing this with Behind Dreaming and maybe I should.

Contributing to Creative Commons

• Do you use Creative Commons?
• Do you have an interest in using Creative Commons?
• Do you want to know more about Creative Commons?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions then you should check the Creative Commons wiki out. The CC wiki contains a vast range of information for all types of CC users, which has been created to help you make the most of Creative Commons.

I also recently posted about the 'Case Study' Creative Commons has produced about how CC been applied in areas like Music, Literature, Visual Arts and Education. My post Building an Australasian Commons: Case Study will direct you the Case Study which can be downloaded in PDF.

5 Lesser-Known Benefits to Creative Commons

5 Lesser-Known Benefits to Creative Commons is an article at the Blog Herald which covers some unsung virtues of CC licenses for bloggers.

So for the 2nd time today I found something about Creative Commons I wanted to share. I found out about both these things through Twitter - @creativecommons and @CC Australia.

Building an Australasian Commons: Case Study

"In August 2008, as part of the new CC Case Study Wiki initiative, CC Australia published the accompanying print volume Building an Australasian Commons: Creative Commons Case Studies Volume 1. Edited by staffer Rachel Cobcroft, Volume 1 includes more than 60 case studies - http://creativecommons.org.au/casestudiesvol1"

The readable PDF version is available here
(Note: this PDF is quite large so it may take some people a bit of time to download)

This Case Study "provides detailed evidence of the ways in which CC licences is being used by creators and institutions along with an explanation of their motivations"

If you use Creative Commons or have any interest in doing so then you should visit the Creative Commons wiki

Rachel, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation and everyone else that worked on this have done a wonderful job :-)

The Commons: past, present & future

In the last couple of days I have added a widget to promote Creative Commons. I have done this because as a creator who posts their work online this movement has given me tools that let me clearly communicate what I am comfortable with others doing with what I post. I wonder what the next 6 years will be like for Creative Commons: I hope they do succeed in breaking down needless barriers in science and education. The following takes well over an hour to watch - though you should not let this stop you :-)

The Commons: Celebrating Accomplishments, Discerning Futures*


*this will also link you to the video on YouTube

The Writer's Guide to the Galaxy?

The Australia Council for the Arts have created a resource for writers in the digital world called The writer’s guide to making a digital living. I am slowly working through this guide and it has already provided with food for thought. Even if you are not from Australia this guide is worth a look. The poster that you can also get from here New WRITING Universe is a brilliant snap shot of different paths for writers in the digital world.

If you want to know more about Creative Commons from an Australian perspective then I recommend following Elliott Bledsoe's Creative Commons blog. It was through this blog that I found out about The Writer's Guide to the Galaxy?

There is also the option to get updates directly from Creative Commons Australia via twitter.

What CC licences I have selected

Across this blog and my blog of poetry, I have chosen 2 types of Creative Commons licences. The second choice I made was whether I would apply a CC licence across the whole blog or on each post within a blog.

The blog Behind Dreaming is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License and has been applied across the whole blog.

While the blog To Write is to Dream... has a CC licence applied to each post within the blog. Some posts have had a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License and others Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.

The choice of applying a licence on a single post instead of across a whole blog comes down to the fact that almost all of the posts within my blog To Write is to Dream... are poems that I have written. These poems are each works by themselves that I have chosen to make available through a blog. I started applying a single CC licence across my whole blog of poetry but ran into problems with a few poems where I want to know if someone else wants to remix them. One of these poems that made me glad that I have more than one option when it comes to CC licences is It is not fair.... This poem was difficult to write and I posted it on the blog because I did not want to hide it away any longer as I felt it was something I had to say, especially if it takes me a few more months until I am ready to work on it again.

The last issue for me is still really a question I have to find the answer to and it is around the area of a CC jurisdiction. I am Australian who is now living and working in New Zealand and I have no idea how long I will be in New Zealand for. I posted my 1st poem on my blog of poetry on August 3 2008. The chose I made was to apply an Australian CC licence on both my blogs. My question specifically is what jurisdiction should I apply to my blogs while I am living in New Zealand if I am Australian? I will see if I can find an answer to my question about jurisdiction and will post it here.

• To read about what Creative Commons is read my post Creative Commons: Share, Remix, Reuse - Legally or go directly to the Creative Commons site.

Creative Commons: Share, Remix, Reuse — Legally

Before I go into why I have chosen to use Creative Commons (CC) on both my blogs I thought I should explain what it actually is and where to find more information about CC licences.

Creative Commons helps you publish your work online while letting others know exactly what they can and can't do with your work. This means as a creator I can define how what I create can be shared, remixed and reused legally by someone else. 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." Most of the information within this blog post has been copied directly from http://creativecommons.org/ in accordance to the CC licence they have chosen: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

I think any questions you have will be answered by going to the Creative Commons site and/or contacting those responsible for CC within your jurisdiction.

• To read about why I have chosen to use Creative Commons go to the post What CC licences I have selected.