Creative Commons

We have entered a new media age. It is no longer financially viable for most media not to exist on the Internet. New musicians would not be heard, newspapers would not be read, photography would not be viewed if they did share their work online. As a result abundance of this media online and the widespread use of the Internet, new kinds of expression have emerged and become increasingly pervasive.

In one very famous example of an oversight of creative control, cartoonist, Simon Tofield, created a cartoon that became viral via YouTube called Simon's Cat. Some people started using the cartoon on their web pages without attributing the work to him, and some even claimed his work as their own. It wasn't until Tofield began using a content ID to tag his work that he was able to be recognized for his work. (You can hear a short interview with Tofield about how he has used Creative Commons to share his cartoons on this Tech Crunch Blog by Paul Carr here).

Thank goodness for Creative Commons stepping in and attempting to legally organize some of this widespread creative activity that might otherwise be completely chaotic. The six different types of copy right licenses that Creative Commons offers seem to be comprehensive, and they make it easy for potential users of creative content to know what is okay to use and what is not. This is especially great for LIS because copyright is absolutely vital for librarians to pay attention to, not just in the distribution of materials but also in their communication with the wider community on behalf of the library.

Here's a cartoon I did about the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Attribution Right:

Look at that! I've posted an image! This should segue well into my next post on Thing 9: Using Flickr.