Reading blogs or perusing photo-sharing sites, you may have come across what looks like a copyright symbol, but with two Cs in a circle instead of one, usually paired with the phrase “some rights reserved.” This is the mark of Creative Commons, a non-profit group offering copyright-like licenses that encourage information sharing.

Full information on Creative Commons and its licenses is available at creativecommons.org

The philosophy is essentially that creative ideas can be improved when approached with a group mentality—locking them down with the usual copyrights hinders creative thinking. It should be noted up front that this is not to say that regular copyrights don’t have their place, especially in design, as certain ideas and corporate works demand protection and the integrity of the original design.

Rather, for graphic and web designers, Creative Commons-licensed components can be pulled together (along with non-CC components, your own art, and so on) to create new pieces that solve design challenges in exciting ways that you may not have been able to achieve working alone.

There are many different Creative Commons licenses an artist can choose from, so it’s important to read up on them, do careful searches, and consider your final output. For example, you might come across a photo with an “Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike” license. This means that you can use the work for non-commercial pieces as long as you credit the photographer (”Attribution”) and use the same CC license type for the resulting piece (”Share Alike”). Or you may find a web design template that is Attribution only, meaning you can do what you like with it, even commercially, as long as you credit the designer.

A search at creativecommons.org led me to styleshout.com, a site full of web design templates that I can use commercially as long as I include a link back to the site.

Some works are CC-licensed as “No derivatives,” meaning that you must not change the work in any way. For example, you may find a photo listed as “Attribution No Derivatives,” meaning you could post it on your blog unchanged with credit to the photographer (for example) but not use crop it and reduce its opacity for a web page background.

Most commercial designers will want to check both boxes at the top of search.creativecommons.org, “Search for works I can use for commercial purposes” and “Search for works I can modify, adapt, or build upon.” Though once you find an item, it’s wise to double-check the license information before doing any work. You may even want to contact the artist directly for some extra collaboration.

The most important thing to remember when using any CC-licensed work is to do your research, read about the license carefully, and always follow the rules for crediting the original artist. If you license any work with Creative Commons, you’d want your fellow designers to do the same, right?

Which comes to the topic of licensing your own work. You wouldn’t want to apply a CC license to a corporate design piece that should never be reproduced or changed by another designer, but you may want to share some photos, layout templates, illustrations, and other component pieces that would benefit other artists. Since CC is based on copyright law, anything you can copyright can be CC-licensed. But a CC license is irrevocable, so “no backsies”! You can’t decide that others can make derivatives of your work and use it commercially, then change your mind later. It’s all about sharing, for the long term. And it’s easy to get your work licensed—just click the License button at the top of the website, helping you choose a license and giving you CC button code for use on your site.

Like any type of content protection, there are a lot of important details and rules involved with using Creative Commons. Your first stop should be the CC FAQ [http://creativecommons.org/faq/], part of the enormous Creative Commons Wiki that answers every question you could ever think of regarding licensing and usage of material. It seems a little heavy at first, but well worth the time—just think of what you might create with a little collaboration!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Design, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.