Great CC Resources from the Community

Great CC Resources from the Community:
For people wanting to learn about CC and its application in different sectors, there is a sea of materials available online. In particular, CC’s international affiliates create a huge number of educational resources that cross language and cultural boundaries.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about my work sorting through some of these resources to identify some of the best, focusing on CC license use for public sector information, for publishing content on a variety of digital platforms, and for generating revenue. As promised, today I’ll highlight some of the resources I’ve discovered.

Intro to CC

For those who are just getting acquainted with Creative Commons:

• CC Qatar’s Meet Creative Commons video offers a great introduction to the benefits of CC licensing, the different types of licenses in CC’s license suite, and how to choose a license that’s right for your work.


• CC Poland has created a great quick guide to the licences in their open poster.


• If you’re looking for more depth, the new School of Open initiative, a collaboration between P2PU and CC, is just getting off the ground, but it already offers the short Get CC Savvy course.

CC and Government

For those interested in the potential of CC licenses to encourage unexpected and innovative re-use of information collected and published by government agencies:

• Creative Commons and Public Sector Information: Flexible tools to support PSI creators and re-users, a paper by CC’s own Timothy Vollmer and Diane Peters, explains how CC licenses encourage public sector information re-use and why CC BY and CC0 are the most appropriate licenses for this type of information.


• If you want to go deeper into this topic, you may wish to look at Creative Commons licensing for public sector information: Opportunities and pitfalls by Mireille van Eechoud and Brenda van der Wal, which was produced in collaboration with CC Netherlands.


• There is also Enabling Open Access to Public Sector Information with Creative Commons Licenses — The Australian Experience by Anne Fitzgerald, Neale Hooper and Brian Fitzgerald, which is summarized in the Creative Commons in the Public Sector (3.7 MB PPTX) presentation from CC Australia.

Journalism and Blogging

For those working on journalism and citizen media in the digital age:

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation has developed a Legal Guide for Bloggers that covers many legal topics pertinent to content publishers, including fair use and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.


• The Emerging Journalism Models & Creative Commons (3.7 MB PDF) presentation by CC’s Eric Steuer provides several case studies of new models for journalism that take advantage of CC licenses.


• Over at Ars Technica, there’s Creative Commons images & you: a quick guide for image users, which gives pointers on finding CC licensed images and offers guidelines for using images under CC NonCommercial licenses.

Business Models

Finally, resources that demonstrate how open content licenses can form an important component of online revenue models:

• Creative Sector Case Studies (1.1 MB PPTX), again from CC Australia, presents cases studies of creators generating revenue by releasing their work to the public under CC licenses.


• Musician Dan Bull (via CC United Kingdom), writer Cory Doctorow (who has been writing on the subject for years), and filmmaker Nina Paley have all been interviewed about how (and why) they use CC-licensed works to build a relationship with their audience, increase their distribution, and promote themselves.


• On his blog Techdirt, Mike Masnick has written some of the definitive articles about monetization through what he calls the “Connect with Fans + Reason to Buy” business model.

For more information on business models, see my fact sheet, Business Models for Creative Works & Creative Commons Licensing (90 KB PDF).
The links above represent just a small portion of the resources out there teaching about Creative Commons licensing in different spheres. For more materials, a good place to start is our wiki, which has pages that collect resources and case studies on a wide range of topics. For resources in your language or relevant to your country, check out your local affiliate’s website.
In closing, I wanted to mention that my internship at CC came to an end last week. I’ve really enjoyed working with the CC team and learning about the organization’s work, and hope to stay a part of the CC community.
Natalya can be reached via Twitter at @NBerenshteyn.

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