Verdi May 21st, 2007

Every time you create something like a video for your videoblog (or anything else like a photo, song or book) you automatically own an “All Rights Reserved” copyright on it. And when you put it on the Internet, unless you say otherwise, that’s the license attached to your work. “So what?” you say, “Copyright protects my work from being stolen.” Well, we all know that in reality, nothing will protect your work from being stolen - not even DRM. The idea is to protect your work from being used in ways that you haven’t given permission for. Again, this won’t prevent anyone from doing anything, it just gives you a legal recourse.

The problem is that Copyright is “All Rights Reserved.” It doesn’t give permission for anyone do anything with your work. What if you want to make your work available and accessible to as many people as possible? What if you want to allow people to repost your work and tell others about it? What if you want to contribute to the world’s common cultural and intellectual knowledge by allowing others to reuse and build upon your work? Well, that’s where Creative Commons comes in.

A Creative Commons license amends your Copyright with the permission for others to use your work in certain ways. Creative Commons licenses span the gap between Copyright - All Rights Reserved and Public Domain - No Rights Reserved. It’s a “Some Rights Reserved” Copyright.

The nice thing about hosting your videos on blip.tv or the Internet Archive is that they allow you to select a Creative Commons license when you upload. They use a very simple form, like the one on the Creative Commons site, to help you decide what license is right for you. All you have to do is answer two questions: Do you want to allow commercial use of your work? and Do you want to allow modifications or your work? This will give you one of six different Creative Commons licenses.

If you go to the license section of the Creative Commons website and fill out the form, you’ll get a license along with a snippet of code that you can paste into a videoblog post or into your sidebar that will link to a plain English version of your license (the plain English version contains a link to the full legal text) that clearly lays out what someone can do with your work and under what conditions. Here’s ours:


This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Here are a few resources for further information:
Creative Commons
Poscasting Legal Guide
Rules For The Revolution (A podcast that answers legal questions about the laws affecting podcasting and new media.)

Tags:creativecommons

The What is Creative Commons? by Freevlog, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

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