[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOsfpLUBOcs]
Creative Commons License A Shared Culture by Jesse Dylan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.

I’ve noticed an increase lately in general awareness of copyright issues and correct use of Creative Commons licenses. It is a welcome development that producers of online content are asking questions, becoming more aware, and improving their practice (I include myself in this group!). This year, I included Copyright and Creative Commons in my 2nd year BScIT module in Professional Skills. Feedback from students — most of whom are actively blogging and sharing other forms of digital content online — was positive. It is important for all educators to model best practice in this area and to share information and resources which assist our students in using online content easily, ethically and legally.

Following are some useful copyright and Creative Commons resources which can be shared with students to help them to learn more about copyright and Creative Commons, find CC-licensed content, and extract CC license information:

Understanding copyright & Creative Commons:
Finding images & content:
  • Compfight – excellent search tool for Creative Commons-licensed Flickr images
  • CC Search – powerful search across a variety of platforms (e.g. Flickr, Google images, YouTube) to help you find content you can share, use, remix
  • Flickr images – enter search term, click Advanced Search, then tick the box “only search within Creative Commons-licensed content”
  • Flickr CC bluemountains – search for CC images on Flickr, returns images and CC license information
  • Content Directories – extensive list of directories of Creative Commons-licensed materials (audio, video, image, text)
  • Creative Commons Wiki – a Creative Commons image directory
Extracting license information:
  • OpenAttribute is a simple-to-use tool which detects Creative Commons license information and formats an attribution that conforms with the terms of the license. Open Attribute is currently available as an add-on for 3 browsers: Firefox, Chrome and Opera.
  • If you use Flickr to search for CC-licensed images, ImageCodr can be used to generate ready-to-use HTML code containing the CC license information (great when using images in your blog).
  • When you search XPERT (i.e. the Xerte Public E-learning ReposiTory) for open learning resources, you will receive the required CC license information along with the resource.

Finally, you can keep up-to-date by following @creativecommons on Twitter and keeping an eye on the Creative Commons blog.

I welcome comments, feedback, recommendations for additional resources.

4 thoughts on “Copyright and Creative Commons resources”

  1. Hi and thank you for the list!
    I can also add http://www.picdrome.com, a growing Public Domain picture collection, free of copyright and licensed under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication. All items are free to download for personal and commercial use, without restriction and are available in high definition. New photos are added on a daily basis.

  2. I don’t know whether it’s just me or if perhaps everyone else
    experiencing issues with your blog. It appears as if some of the written
    text in your posts are running off the screen.

    Can somebody else please comment and let me know if this is happening to them too?
    This may be a problem with my browser because I’ve had this happen before. Kudos

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