Have you been working on a slideshow, elearning or even your website and been stuck needing a particular kind of picture. You check clipart and come up with nothing. You scan Google and find some good ones, but don’t want to sign up for a stock photo website to purchase them. Or perhaps you are developing something and want some background music to go with it…where can you get some music you can include without infringing on someone’s copyright.
The answer is Creative Commons.
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to “increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in “the commons” — the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing.” They do this by creating a “simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to creative work. The Creative Commons licenses enable people to easily change their copyright terms from the default of ’all rights reserved’ to ’some rights reserved.’ ”
Essentially, an artist (photographer, musician, etc…) uploads their work online and publishes it with a specific Creative Commons License designation. This outlines how you can reuse their work, for free, and give them credit for the item you borrowed. Pretty cool, eh? Yes, very.
OK, OK…WHERE CAN I GET THE FREE STUFF THEN?
- Photos - Flickr has a very simple way of locating photos that are available for use under Creative Commons.
- Music – There are several good sites available for music. They are: Freesound, Free Music Archive, Jamendo, CC Mixter, and Opsound. Thanks to Tom Kuhlmann of the Articulate Rapid E-Learning Blog for the more complete list of free music sites.
- You may also search on the Creative Commons website for copyright free material.
Remember, as you use items other artists create, you should seek opportunities to give back and share the goodwill. Perhaps one day you’ll be taking pictures and find that some of them might work for other people as well. Upload your work someplace and submit it for use under Creative Commons Licensing.
As Martha says…it’s a good thing.
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