Creative Commons

Huh?

I did not really understand the first video--seemed like yet another montage of images with hip background music! Luckily the second one made more sense.

But is it for me?

I can see that some people in some fields might find this very useful. The example that made the most sense was the violinist playing a duet with someone who posted a solo. Cool! But I thought "Who's going to use this? Mostly post-modern cut-n-paste-remixing music and art people, not me!"

I do some sharing, but not with this license

I do use materials from the web that have "limited rights reserved;" for example, crochet patterns that are free but the author does not want you selling the items you make with the pattern. Those patterns don't have a specific CC mark on them, though. I guess if I wanted to create a pattern and post it on the web, I could use the CC mark on it that best matched what I wanted people to do with it.

How to get licensed

This is how I would do it: Go to "license your work" on the website. Fill out the form with name of work, etc. Decide on what and how much I want to share. Then copy the HTML code and paste it onto my website, or email it to myself.

It would look like this:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

But would readers know what that means? I guess they would just click on the link to find out.

Would this help students?

It would be a good way to begin a discussion about what copyright laws are! If one wanted to have that discussion.

I'm not sure how I would use remixing in one of my classes. I'm not completely crazy about the cut and paste culture. . . . (see Susanne Gubanc's blog).

In my role as a teacher, it might be useful if I were creating web course materials to share with the world, but I don't know if I would do that. I guess I could look around for stuff that has this kind of license, but I did not find any kind of index on their page ("journalism exercises licensed with us," "rhetoric assignments licensed with us")

Suggestion Box

I wish they had a little index of where you could find works that have CC licenses. That would be cool. I guess the idea is that artists/scientists/writers or whoever just puts the license mark on their work.