Creative Commons
Have you heard of the Creative Commons licensing scheme? It seems quite useful.
Basically, it’s an accepted intellectual property sharing framework that helps content creators (me) to easily describe exactly which permissions they give to consumers (you) of their works and sets clear expectations in terms of attribution (if any be desired).
That was a mouthful, and I’m sorry, but there’s not much I can do about it now.
I’m going to use Creative Commons to relicense some materials I created for a class on project management. I think this is a much better arrangement because the contributors of the materials deserve better than being stuck under my copyright.
Actually, it’s not so much the copyright of the text I care about, it’s the drawing. That really was something I thought up, and I’m proud of it. I would like to receive credit when it’s used, but feel that people should be free to pass it along for non-commercial uses.
Creative Commons licensing allows me the flexibility to do things like decide for each individual work how I would like it licensed, and then it automatically generates the images and text I need for my creation.
They also provide a registry service and the legal language, if I need it, I think. The truth is that the web is impossible to control at that level, and in my estimation it’s better someone use the work for human benefit, even without attribution, than to have the work never be used by anyone and reserve all the credit!!
OK – that’s about it. I’ve created some links that should make it easy for you to find out more about Creative Commons. It’s a cool thing and I would like to support it.
So, this is how I’m going to use Creative Commons licensing:
Step 1: Head on over to Creative Commons and answer a few simple questions that apply to this specific work.
Step 2. Get the automatically generated logo 
and use it instead of the © copyright symbol currently in place.
Step 3: Follow the links provided (they’re small, but they can be found) to the actual text I need to put into the document itself.
Publish the new docs. Push the link to the gang of designers. Voila!
Peace,
Alex
P.S. Nod to Mr. Cory Doctorow, fun-to-read blogger and author, and a leader in the realm of CC licensing. He was the fellow who exemplified CC use in a way I could understand. Thanks, Mr. Doctorow!
