Author Names:
Christopher R. Martin and Bettina Fabos
Activity Objective:
Students will practice and reflect on the process of assigning a Creative Commons license to a piece of art.
Let’s get started! Click the forward and backward arrows to navigate through the slides. You may also click the above outline button to skip to certain slides.
Whenever we are using online media, we must operate under the assumption that every digital image and sound recording is copyrighted. Downloading any image onto a desktop and using it for any purpose is therefore illegal, even more so if it is incorporated into one’s own project and then republished back to the Web.
As an alternative to copyright, the Creative Commons (CC) was developed in 2002 by legal scholars (Lawrence Lessig and others) who were dissatisfied by what they saw as exceedingly harsh copyright laws. Every image after 1923 is automatically saddled with a copyright of 70 years + a lifetime for a single author, 120 years if it is a corporate author. The Creative Commons is about authorial control. Through a CC license, authors retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some use of their work.
The CC is also about sharing and building a commons together, where anyone is free to create and share on the Web. As an alternative to copyright, the CC has been extremely successful: billions of images and sound recordings and other copyrightable material—such as documents, open source code, and medical reports—have been licensed to the CC.
This simple activity is meant to help you understand what the CC is all about. It can be done as an in-class or take-home activity.
Complete the following steps, and record your thoughts in the box on the next slide to bring back to discuss with your classmates.
Step 1: Create a digital image, either before the day of this activity, or during class. The image could be a drawing on a scrap piece of paper or in a notebook (scanned or photographed with a digital camera); a digital photo of an object, person, or landscape; the still of an original video; an archival family photo that you’ve been given permission to scan (by the photographer or, if that author is no longer living, by their family); or an old graphic from an archival book or manuscript that dates before 1923.
Step 2: Visit the Creative Commons page (creativecommons.org) and navigate to the explanation of individual licenses (creativecommons.org/licenses). Go over each license: Attribution (CC-BY), Share-Alike (SA), No Derivs (ND), NonCommercial (NC), and various combinations of licenses, so you are clear what each one means.
Step 3: Using a class Flickr account created just for this exercise (Flickr.com—Flickr is owned by SmugMug), follow your instructor’s directions and upload your image either before or during class.
Step 4: In the process of finalizing the image upload, assign a CC license to your image. Again, this can be done as a group, or individually.
Use the space below to answer the following question.