Guest Author - Adele Sweeney

Creative Commons aims to make life easier for both creators and users of copyrighted works by presenting the terms of use in a graphical way - instantly showing what you can and cannot do with a resource you find online.

Copyright can be a very confusing issue, and also varies with where you live in the world but Creative Commons helps makes it all look so simple!

At one end of the scale you have the popular (c) symbol attached to works, meaning 'Copyright' - ALL rights reserved. At the other end of the scale you have the free-for-all goldmine of free to use work in the Public Domain, where no rights are reserved.

Creative Commons is the mid-point - allowing creators to retain copyright while they give permission to others to use their works in certain ways laid out by the license they choose to apply - this is 'some rights reserved'.

What are the License types?

Commercial Use
Basically whether or not the creator will allow you to use their images for commercial use or not.

Modifications or Derivative Works
Whether you can copy, distribute, display or make derivative works from an image, or not. This is often allowed provided you apply an indentical license, known as share alike.

Attribution
You are required to give credit to the creator.

This information is presented by the recognisable Creative Commons buttons displaying the symbols for each type of use - hopefully these will become more and more common so that we instantly recognise and understand what we can and cannot do with any piece of clip art, photo or graphic etc.


How do you find Clip Art you can use under a Creative Commons License?

Sometimes it is better to be safe than sorry, so if you are looking specifically for clip art to re-use, modify or distribute somehow, you can search directly 'just' for Creative Commons works via their website. You can also refine your search by clip art that you can use for 'commercial purposes'. There is also a list of 'Content Directories' with links to Image sites where you can safely search for clip art to use.

For Firefox users, there's also a special search engine that you can add to your toolbar.

What about Clip Art you come across online?

Sometimes you come across stuff on the web that you would like to use, but you're not sure if you really should. In this case, look for the grey Creative Commons logo near the licensed works, or a statement that the work is licensed 'for x,y and z' under Creative Commons.

Also, if you're a Firefox user, there's also a very handy add on called MozCC - this will detect any Creative Commons information in a webpage and display the relevant icons on your browser.

You can get more information on using clip art under a Creative Commons license, and the different types of use available, via videos and cartoons on the main website - it really does make life so much easier! The more people start to use Creative Commons, the less fraught it will be for those of us who want to re-use and make derivative works from clip art or images found online.