Understanding Creative Commons Licenses

It doesn’t matter if you’re a student, a scholar, or just someone with a blog: we all run into issues finding images that you’re allowed to use on your website, in your research, or in an advertisement. While copyright laws have avenues for use, it’s not guaranteed that you can use the image you want, and the process of getting access to that image may be slow. That’s why looking at images with a Creative Commons license are a great alternative to traditional copyrighted images.

A Creative Commons license is a more flexible option than copyright and can be used on images, or basically any other kind of shareable work. When a creator chooses a Creative Commons license, people do not need to ask for their explicit permission to use their work. However, that doesn’t mean that the creator gives up control of the image; rather, they choose one of six current options for their Creative Commons license:

  • Attribution: The most lenient license. The attribution license lets others do what they please with your work, so long as they credit the original creator.
  • Attribution-ShareAlike: Similar to the attribution license, though all derivatives of the original work must be licensed under identical terms to that original.
  • Attribution-NoDerivs: This allows others to use the work as they please, so long as they do not change or manipulate it, and credit the creator.
  • Attribution-NonCommercial: This license allows people to use and tweak the work freely, except for commercial enterprises. The derivative works do not have to be licensed under identical terms.
  • Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: Same as above except derivative works must be licensed under identical terms.
  • Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs: The most restrictive license. Others may download the work, but they cannot change them or use them commercially.

All-in-all, most Creative Commons works have “some rights reserved.” As a consumer, you have the responsibility to look up license of any Creative Commons work you hope to use (which isn’t very hard – most of the time any limitations are listed).

Here are some examples of images with differing Creative Commons licenses:

The only stipulation on this image is that I must provide proper attribution. “Albert Cavalier King Charles Spaniel” was taken by Glen Bowman on July 21, 2013 and is hosted on flickr.com.

This image of a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel only requires creator attribution. It can be used commercially so long as I acknowledge Glen Bowman, the photo’s creator. So if I so chose, I could hypothetically edit this photo to use as a welcome banner on my Cavalier King Charles Spaniel appreciation blog, include it in a PowerPoint I use for my veterinary school class, or copy it in an advertisement for my dog-walking business.

This Creative Commons licensed image requires proper attribution. “Cavalier King Charles Spaniel” was taken by James Watson (kingjimmy81) on August 17, 2013, and is hosted on Flickr.com.

This image of a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel has a more restrictive license than the above image. You can share the image in any medium or format, but you must give appropriate credit to James Watson, the creator. You cannot use it commercially, and you cannot distribute derivatives of the photo. So I could include this on my Cavalier King Charles appreciation blog with proper attribution, but could not edit it to make it into a banner on the homepage. And while using it in my veterinary school PowerPoint is still okay, I could not use it in an advertisement for my dog-walking business.

If you’re interested in finding Creative Commons works, you can use the Creative Commons Search function, which links up to various search engines, including Google, Google Images, Wikimedia Commons, and Flickr. If you’re interested in learning more about intellectual property in general, visit the Main Library’s Intellectual Property LibGuide, or get in touch with the library’s copyright specialist, Sara Benson (srbenson@illinois.edu).

Random Facts: Copyright Edition

Source: Openclipart

This post was guest authored by Scholarly Communication and Publishing Graduate Assistant Paige Kuester.


Just in case “Copyright” is one of the categories when you finally make it on Jeopardy!

  1. Facts aren’t copyrightable

Generally, unless there is some creativity in the expression associated with them, facts aren’t copyrightable. Even if you were the first person ever to know that particular fact, unless you express it in a creative fixed way, there’s no way that copyright can attach to facts.

  1. Monkeys have yet to successfully go to court and claim copyright

While this fact seems like a statement of the obvious, if you are not familiar with the Monkey Selfie case, you’ll be surprised to learn that accomplishing this was the goal of PETA recently. It’s probably a good thing that the case settled (though unsuccessfully in the eyes of monkeys that are garnering for copyright everywhere) with the owner of the camera agreeing to donate a percentage of proceeds gained from the picture to habitat protection, because how else would we have gotten access to some of these images? However, it is questionable if images taken by animals are even copyrightable at all.

  1. Just because you can’t find the © symbol, does not mean that a work does not have copyright.

Since 1989, works no longer require a copyright symbol to have copyright attached to them. Which makes having a copyright easier than in previous eras, but makes it less obvious that a work in copyrighted in general. Of course, there are benefits to including one.

  1. Plagiarism doesn’t just plague the lazy.

This article discusses five great people who have plagiarized.

  1. You own a copyright.

At least, if you have ever written anything creative down in a fixed medium that was your own idea, you own one. Probably more than one, including marker scribbles and grocery lists and papers that you wrote in high school. As long as you don’t transfer your rights, you will hold that copyright for your entire life plus seventy years.

Make sure you share your winnings with us.

For more information about copyright, check out this undergraduate journal library guide, this Author’s rights guide,  or contact our copyright librarian, Sara Benson.

Sources:

Bailey, Jonathan. (2010). 5 Things that Can’t Be Copyrighted. Plagiarism Today.  Retrieved from https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2010/01/08/5-things-that-cant-be-copyrighted/

Bailey, Jonathan. (2015). 5 Great People Who Plagiarized. Plagiarism Today.  Retrieved from https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2015/02/10/5-great-people-who-plagiarized/

New Media Rights. (2011). II. What Can and Can’t Be Copyrighted? New Media Rights. Retrieved from https://www.newmediarights.org/business_models/artist/ii_what_can_and_can’t_be_copyrighted

Post, David. (2017). No Monkey Business Here: The Monkey Copyright Case is Over–For Now. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/09/17/no-monkey-business-here-the-monkey-selfie-copyright-case-is-over-for-now/?utm_term=.1624b07a5524

Open Access and… Animals?

Image of a blue and white bird flying over a lake with mountains in the background.

Source: Pixabay.

This post was guest authored by Scholarly Communication and Publishing Graduate Assistant Paige Kuester.


The modern research landscape is an asset for biologists, zoologists, conservationists, etc. They can track animals, check up on them, figure out what is helping or harming their environment, and report or adjust accordingly. They tag animals and create twitter handles for them to tweet out their location. They can also create crowdsourcing research methods in order to utilize the interest of the public. And with open access, researchers can easily pass this information on to the public, so that they can create even more awareness and participation, too.

Great, right?

Maybe not. Think about who else has access to that information.

Poachers. Yes, we are still living in an age of poachers. This isn’t just your Tarzan poachers tromping through the jungle, though there is still some of that. This is much more threatening.

Poachers don’t have to track animals anymore, because scientists are doing that for them. Poachers can just gather data posted online through open access sources, and plan out their trip. Crowd-sourced research and tourists apps can also provide this information. If poachers are really nifty, they can tap into radio signals and the like that are sending out locations from the animal tags to the researchers.

One way that researchers can combat this is to not post such specific locations and data on animals that are likely to be poached, especially when publishing with an open access journal. Those in charge of apps can not make information about endangered species publicly available. It is a little more difficult to deter signal hackers, but monitoring and adding more security to these is one way to curb this unfortunate trend.

Open access is great, spreading information about awesome and endangered animals is great, but leaving them vulnerable to exploitation is not so much. It is a bit like Facebook. Sharing your location and your Friday night plans may be fine when you know it is just your friends seeing this information, but when making it public, maybe don’t advertise that you are going to out of your apartment for weeks on end, leaving your valuables alone and unmonitored. While animal privacy rights are not yet a thing, a little courtesy can go a long way in protecting those who don’t have a say.

Sources:

Hewitt, Sarah. (2017, June 5). Scientists Are Debating Whether Animals have a Right to Privacy. Motherboard. Retrieved from: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43ydkb/animals-privacy-tracking-data-science-journals-open-access-banff-national-park

Scheele, Benjamin, and David Lindenmayer. (2017, May 25). Scientists Are Accidently Helping Poachers Drive Endangered Species to Extinction. The Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/scientists-are-accidentally-helping-poachers-drive-rare-species-to-extinction-78342

Welz, Adam. (2017, September 6). Unnatural Surveillance: How Online Data is Putting Species at Risk. Yale Environment 360. Retrieved from http://e360.yale.edu/features/unnatural-surveillance-how-online-data-is-putting-species-at-risk

Spotlight: Unexpected Surprises in the Internet Archive

Image of data banks with the Internet Archive logo on them.

The Internet Archive.

For most of us, our introduction to the Internet Archive was the Wayback Machine, a search engine that can show you snapshots of websites from the past. It’s always fun to watch a popular webpage like Google evolve from November 1998 to July 2004 and beyond, but there is so much more that the Internet Archive has to offer. Today, I’m going to go through a few highlights from the Internet Archive’s treasure trove of material, just to get a glimpse at all of the things you can do and see on this amazing website.

Folksoundomy: A Library of Sound

Folksoundomy is the Internet Archives’ collection of sounds, music and speech. The collection is collaboratively created and tagged, with many participants from outside of the library sphere. There are more than a million items in the Folksoundomy collection, with items that range in date back to the invention of Thomas Edison’s invention of recorded sound in 1877. From Hip Hop Mixtapes to Russian audiobooks, sermons to stand-up comedy, music, podcasts, radio shows and more, Folksoundomy is an incredible resource for scholars looking at the history of recorded sound.

TV News Archive

With over countless clips collected since 2009, the TV News Archive includes everything from this morning’s news to curated series of fact-checked clips. Special collections within the TV News Archive include Understanding 9/11, Political Ads, and the TV NSA Clip Library. With the ability to search closed captions from US TV new shows, the Internet Archive provides a unique research opportunity for those studying modern US media.

Software Library: MS-DOS Games

Ready to die of dysentery on The Oregon Trail again? Now is your chance! The Internet Archive’s MS-DOS Games Software Library uses an EM-DOSBOX in-browser emulator that lets you go through and play games that would otherwise seem lost to time. Relive your childhood memories or start researching trends in video games throughout the years with this incredible collection of playable games!

National Security Internet Archive (NSIA)

Created in March 2015, the NSIA collects files from muckracking and national security organizations, as well as historians and activists. With over 2 million files split into several collections, the NSIA helps collect everything from CIA Lessons Learned from Czechoslovakia to the UFO Files, a collection of declassified UFO files from around the world. Having these files accessible and together is incredibly helpful to researchers studying the history of national security, both in the US and elsewhere in the world.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

That’s right! We’re also on the Internet Archive. The U of I adds content in several areas: Illinois history, culture and natural resources; US railroad history; rural studies and agriculture; works in translation; as well as 19th century “triple-decker” novels and emblem books. Click on the above link to see what your alma mater is contributing to the Internet Archive today!

Of course, this is nowhere near everything! With Classic TV CommercialsGrateful Dead, Community Software and more, it’s definitely worth your time to see what on the Internet Archive will help you!

Public Domain and Creativity

This post was guest authored by Scholarly Communication & Publishing Graduate Assistant Nicole Moriah Rhodes.


The first American copyright law protected works for fourteen years after they were published and gave the copyright owner the opportunity to renew the copyright for another fourteen years. Few did, and works passed quickly into the public domain.

The copyright term is much longer now–it varies, but you, a human, will likely own many copyrights until 70 years after you die. Some people argue that a long copyright term increases the incentive to make creative work.

However, despite the longer term, statistical analysis of the number of copyright registrations through changes in population, economy, US law, and available technology doesn’t find that increasing copyright protection increases the number of copyrighted works. Raymond Shih Ray Ku, Jiayang Sun, & Yiying Fan (2009) find that the people advocating for broader copyright laws probably aren’t advocating for an increase in the amount of creative work: the best indicator of the number of new creative works among the variables in their study is population. Their data suggest that “Laws that reduce or otherwise limit copyright protection are actually more likely to increase the number of new works” (1673) than laws granting more protection.

Such a long period of copyright protection leaves a lot of content unusable to other creators. This comic about documentary filmmakers demonstrates how stringent copyright protections can prevent creative remixing and impede the accurate representation of the world. Work in the public domain can be shared freely, but our real lives are full of content protected by copyright, and people trying to make documentaries can be inhibited by copyright even on incidental work. When they want to use copyrighted material under the fair use doctrine, the threat of lawsuits can have a chilling effect.

Lawrence Lessig (2004) uses the phrase “Walt Disney creativity” to describe “a form of expression and genius that builds upon the culture around us and makes it something different” (24). Disney’s Cinderella, Disney’s live-action Cinderella, fanfiction, and The Lizzie Bennet Diaries could all be considered examples of Walt Disney creativity. But Disney had access to fairly recent work in his time. As Lessig writes:

“Thus, most of the content from the nineteenth century was free for Disney to use and build upon in 1928. It was free for anyone— whether connected or not, whether rich or not, whether approved or not—to use and build upon.

“From 1790 until 1978, the average copyright term was never more than thirty-two years, meaning that most culture just a generation and a half old was free for anyone to build upon without the permission of anyone else. Today’s equivalent would be for creative work from the 1960s and 1970s to now be free for the next Walt Disney to build upon without permission. Yet today, the public domain is presumptive only for content from before the Great Depression.” (24-25)

Michael Hart, the creator of Project Gutenberg and a longtime Urbana resident, viewed copyright law as impeding the abundance that technology could create, beginning with the very first copyright laws after the invention of the Gutenberg Press. While Ku, Sun, & Fan (2009) do find that copyright law helps create and protect both wealth and jobs and allows creators to be rewarded for their work rather than requiring sponsorship, they advocate for reducing copyright protection where it impedes distribution or creativity.

“Because copyright law works in the negative—effectively saying ‘do not use this work, do not copy this work, do not imitate this work’—we are not sending a message that society values the creation of new works. We are only sending the message that we should stay away from those works already created” (1722).

Creative Commons is one venture designed to allow creators to share their work for other creators’ use while preserving the level of protection they choose. However, the default is still a system that restricts access to cultural works past the time when the creator might care, and can even keep works from being preserved so they will be usable when they enter the public domain. Creators should be able to benefit from the work they create, but increasing protections does not necessarily increase those benefits. Excessive copyright terms keep us from being able to discuss and rethink our common culture.