Commonly Creative

Creative Commons (CC) is a web portal that allows local creators, educators and administrators to distribute their ideas and creations; free licences and legal tools make it easy for internet users to share and build on the work of others while abiding by copyright laws.

Creative Commons South Africa states that as South Africans, the idea that collective knowledge should form the starting point of a fluid, continuously-evolving creation process is not new- it is merely an extension of ‘ubuntu’. It supports the belief that the creation process evolves from the community, and that some of the value of the creation must be given back to the community in order to strengthen future contributions.



What does this mean for internet users?
Let’s start with contributors. CC South Africa allows you to keep your copyrights, but also allows people to distribute and copy your work, provided they give you credit- and only on your conditions, which you can specify under your licence. Creative Commons offers six main licences: Attribution (CC BY), Attribution Share Alike (CC BY-SA), Attribution No Derivatives (CC BY-ND), Attribution Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC), Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (CC BY-NC-SA), Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND).

Al Jazeera made use of CC to create a Collective Commons Repository for video posting under the CC Attribution licence. The result of this was eye-opening footage from Gaza where most media companies did not have access. Recently, Al Jazeera launched Al Jazeera Blogs under a CC BY-NC-ND license.

For the user, finding CC licensed media is becoming easier and easier. The best things so far are search engine filters; Yahoo has integrated a CC filter in their Advanced Image Search which makes finding images simple and legal. Apart from that, a full directory of CC licensed audio, video, text, and images can be found at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Directories

CC Sorted
The latest edition to CC South Africa is TweetCC, a way to licence your Tweets, helping you to pick up followers and extend the reach of your tweets. This will hopefully evolve into a method to integrate CC in Twitter streams directly. Want to CC your Facebook content? Join the group ‘"We Want To Share!" - Creative Commons Licensing Options on Facebook Now’ to download a CC licence application for your page.