Copyleft and Creative Commons

What is Copyleft?

Copyleft can be thought of as an intellectual position that is critical of standard copyright law and license agreements that reserve rights, making it difficult for others to make modifications to works.  More specifically, Copyleft is the form of licensing that attempts to solve such issues through creative agreements, sometimes called "reciprocal agreements."  Authors and creators essentially choose give away some of their copy rights, while retaining others.

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that has created several special licenses that allow authors to promote legal sharing and non-commercial use of their works.

Is Creative Commons any benefit to me?

Quite possibly.  There are many educational resourses available to you through Creative Commons licensing.

• OER Commons is a site for open educational resources that may be appropriate for your use, or for your students. If you have JavaScript enabled, look at this experiment on Balloons and Buoyancy as a sample.

• Many photographers on the Flickr website make images available for use.

To search for Creative Commons materials, click here, and then enter your search at the very top of the page in the green bar area. There are also a variety of search engines that can look for Creative Commons licenses on material published on the Internet. 

To investigate Creative Commons license terms, click here.

Example of a Creative Commons Use:

	In this example, the original photograph was posted to Flickr under a Creative Commons license by the creator, WilWheaton.  Click here for WilWheaton's licence, which required the above attribution.
	Another Flicker user, Vertigo25, edited the photograph to make it a "fake title shift" image.  It makes the image look like a minature. Vertigo25 is now the creator of a new work. Click here for Vertigo25's License, which required the above attribution.

NOTE: in both cases, the images have been reduced from their original size for reproduction on this website.

Text by S. Riggs