
Creative commons 
What is Creative Commons?
Watch this video, Building on the Past by Justin Cone, Winner of the Creative Commons Moving Image Contest 2004. Can't see the video? You can either watch it on the YouTube website or adjust your browser settings.
Creative Commons provides free, easy-to-use licences for copyrighted materials. Adopting a Creative Commons licence for your work makes it easier to specify what people can and can't do with it. This standardised approach to reusing and repurposing materials promotes sharing and makes it easier to search for reusable content.
Understanding the licences
Creative Commons licences allow you to label your work as "Some Rights Reserved" instead of "All Rights Reserved". The rights you retain and those you give to others are expressed through the Creative Commons licence you choose.
For example, the CC BY (Creative Commons Attribution) licence "lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials." It is recognisable by this symbol.
Notably for academic staff and researchers, the RCUK's Open Access policy now mandates that research made freely available through the payment of an Article Processing Charge (APC) should be available under a CC BY licence. Other funders are following suit.
The issue of licensing Open Access research outputs has been addressed by the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee's Inquiry into OA. See the response from Creative Commons, explaining the CC-BY Licence.
Creative Commons try to make it as easy as possible to Choose a Licence but there are also considerations to bear in mind.
Finding Creative Commons material
Creative Commons licences are human and machine readable, making it possible to search for materials made available under a particular licence.
For example, find reusable images through Flickr, videos through YouTube (after searching select Filters > Creative Commons) or music through Jamendo (click on Advanced Search) or Creative Commons own music search page. Look for the symbols to see which licence applies to the work. Creative commons offer this helpful advice when choosing music:
Can I use any song with a CC license on it?
Almost — you need to make sure that what you want to do with the music is OK under the terms of the particular Creative Commons license it’s under. CC-licensed music isn’t free for all uses, only some — so make sure to check out the terms (you can find these by clicking on each song’s license icon).
Most importantly, you need to use music that is not licensed under a No Derivative Works license. This means that the musician doesn’t want you to change, transform, or make a derivative work using their music. Under CC licenses, synching the music to images amounts to transforming the music, so you can’t legally use a song under a CC No Derivative Works license in your video.
Also, make sure to properly credit the musician and the track, as well as express the CC license the track is under. For example, you might include text like this at the end of your video:
This video features the song “Desaprendere (Treatment)” by fourstones, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
Content used by permission of ©Newcastle University library Guides. This page is not covered by a creative commons license, please contant them directly for permission to reuse.