Creative Commons License

Sara's Blog by Sara Douglas is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I chose the moderately restrictive Creative Commons License " Attribution-Non-Commercial Share-Alike" cc by-nc-sa. I would recommend the same license for students' use.

Here are the parts and why I chose them for my blog/ recommend for student-created work:

Attribution (others can copy if they give me credit) I want people to be able to freely use or change/build on the original work as long as credit is given. I believe that creative thoughts and actions should be shared, but the original creator should be noted. That is just giving credit where credit is due and something students should always be striving toward.

Non-commercial (they can't use my work for commercial purposes) Others should be able to do re-mixes, mash-ups, etc. but I believe that they should not be allowed to profit financially from work others have done. A student should protect an original creation and have the opportunity to keep the commercial rights to it. I based this on a part of the FAQ section of the Creative Commons website I had read:

"And most educators who put their their educational resources online do so with the idea that they will be widely shared. But if you depend on controlling the copyrights in your resources for your livelihood, you should think carefully before giving away commercial rights to your creative work. For example, many musicians have discovered that offering work for noncommercial use can be quite rewarding."

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Before_Licensing

Share-Alike (they must share in the same way I have) This allows others the freedom to create their own original works using some of my ideas and keep it equally accessible (yet non-commercial) for future creators. It ensures that the content will be able to be tweaked and shared in the same way in the future, always giving credit to those who have created originally. This seems like the "Golden Rule" theory of keeping up the intent of the original creator with regards to his/her sharing philosophy. Students should share.

I love the idea of creative thought/media being made accessible to the world. The final sentence of this article below enthusiastically tells us where it can lead. However, there should be guidelines as far as usage of others' work. Creative Commons licenses are the perfect fit to balance the rights of users with creators. This blurb from Creative Commons site says it well:

The Inside Google Books post announcing the initiative talks a bit about what this all means:

We’ve marked books that rightsholders have made available under a CC license with a matching logo on the book’s left hand navigation bar. People can download these books in their entirety and pass them along: to friends, classmates, teachers, and so on. And if the rightsholder has chosen to allow people to modify their work, readers can even create a mashup–say, translating the book into Esperanto, donning a black beret, and performing the whole thing to music on YouTube.

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Before_Licensing