Creative Commons 3.0 licenses – Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Creative Commons 3.0 licenses are now available (free of course) for any content you want to share virtually or via analog means, and have the right to share with an appropriate license. If you’re not already familiar with Creative Commons, check out their short comic strips “How it Works” and “A Spectrum of Rights.” The Creative Commons movies “Wanna Work Together?” – “Get Creative” and “Building on the Past” also provide excellent overviews of CC and the issues it helps address for content publishers and content re-users. The CC tutorial “Publishing your educational material” provides some step by step instructions. For those looking for CC-licensed content, try the CC search portal.

The CC webpage “Things to think about before you apply a Creative Commons license to your work” includes excellent questions and answers about licensing that is appropriate to use with both students and teachers when discussing copyright and intellectual property (IP) issues. Their “Legal Concepts” page also provides a good starting point for conversations on IP.

For most educators, the changes to the CC licensing schemes probably won’t affect things dramatically. The main difference is your choice to optionally “port” your license for a specific jurisdiction does not include a “generic” option, if you don’t select a country your license will be “unported”:

If you desire a license governed by the Copyright Law of a specific jurisdiction, please select the appropriate jurisdiction.

This is selected at the time you answer the series of questions to determine what type of license you want to use. I’ve updated my CC Attribution-Only license for my blog and podcast content to version 3.0, so now it has a different logo and a slightly changed link:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

The other main difference seems to be that the language of licenses is very explicit on the issue of prohibiting “Endorsement Language:”

That a person may not misuse the attribution requirement of a CC license to improperly assert or imply an association or relationship with the licensor or author, has been implicit in our licenses from the start. We have now decided to make this explicit in both the Legal Code and the Commons Deed to ensure that â€” as our licenses continue to grow and attract a large number of more prominent artists and companies â€” there will be no confusion for either the licensor or licensee about this issue. For a more detailed explanation, see here.

Full descriptions of all the different CC licenses are available. Of particular interest to educational wiki users, the “Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License” now can be shared with a special CC wiki logo:

This wiki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.