The Secret Magic of Creative Commons
If you scroll down to the bottom of a lot of the posts on this blog, you’ll see a set of links and attributions. They look a lot like this:
image credit: “Creative Commons Cupcakes” by Eugene Kim is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Reading that, it’s not exactly clear what everything means. You can probably guess that “Creative Commons Cupcakes” is related to the image above the title of this post…but what other information is lurking under the surface?
Today, I want to tell you two things: one, what that line of text truly means, and two, why that line of text is absolutely critical to the existence of the modern internet as we know it.
We can start with a hypothetical scenario: let’s say that you, much like me, want to write a blog post. That’s nice. But however engaging of a writer you may be, it’s an undeniable truth that people will want some images to go along with the words they’re reading. As any reasonable person would do, then, you turn to the internet for help. You find an image that you personally deem suitable for your use, you download it, and upload it to your blog. No harm, right? Well…
It’s alarmingly easy, under our current system at least, to unintentionally end up committing copyright infringement when sourcing online images. And that is what you’ve just done, most likely. You see, when an image is created — be it a photograph, a drawing, a digital illustration, or whatever — the creator of that image holds what’s known at the copyright to it. By holding the copyright, that individual (or maybe group) has the sole right to publish that image, to modify that image, and to make money using that image. So before you can go willy-nilly throwing images on your blog, you need to do one of two things. Either one: happen to be the copyright owner of an image, or two: gain the copyright holder’s permission for your use of their copyrighted image.
Now, don’t get me wrong, these are both perfectly viable options. I personally have plenty of wonderful images that I took myself, and therefore own the copyright to. You wanna see some spaghetti I had the other night? Take a look:
It was absolutely delicious. But anyway, my point was: This is an image that I personally created, and therefore, it’s an image that I need no one’s permission to use. Perhaps you’re in such a position so that with your blog, you can personally create every single image you use. If you have the time and the resources to spend, individually crafting your visuals one-by-one, more power to you.
I for one, can’t and/or don’t. “Why not?”, you might ask. Well, there are two main reasons. First: actually making high-quality, decent-looking images is a difficult job. You see the photo of the spaghetti. What you don’t see is the setup for the photo, the failed shots, the perfect arrangement of toasty bread and that nostalgic, powdery cheese…and that’s the work that I did to just take a picture of my dinner! I can’t even begin to imagine the work that some people put into their professions as photographers. And, reason two: even if I did just as much work as those professionals, I paid thousands of dollars for professional equipment, I honed my craft until I was at the top of my field, I still couldn’t operate at their level, much less above it. I just have to accept that there will always be a better photographer, a better illustrator, a better sculptor, etc. — lots and lots of them, to be honest. Why should I, in effect, then, waste my time trying to emulate what someone else has already perfected?
That leads us to the second big option for sourcing an image: you can try to secure the copyright yourself, or at least secure the copyright holder’s permission. This is usually two things: difficult and expensive. For one, even figuring out who owns the copyright to some images can be a headache, and once you find them, you’ll be paying hefty sums for their work. Remember: these are the professional image makers we just talked about. They spend years and thousands of dollars on making the absolute best stuff out there, so please don’t believe that I begrudge them their profits. But licensing a photo, let’s say, from Getty Images, costs somewhere in the range of $50-$500+ dollars.
And listen here: you’d better not be downloading these images and using them without paying, and without consent! There are entire companies — notably, Pixsy, for instance — that thrive on hounding those who, intentionally or not, misuse copyrighted works. Once you’ve heard from them, it’s no longer a moral or an ethical issue; we’ve now treaded into the land of legality. I’m not saying you’ll be sued immediately, but I’m not saying you won’t be sued immediately, either. If you do end up in court, in the US at least, get ready to pay up to thousands — or more — when you lose this case, because let me tell you…you will almost certainly lose this case. Or at least settle it.
And that is why you’re going to need to be so very careful when you put images on this hypothetical blog of yours. You need to not just want the image, you need to have it, and have it in a way that’s legally verifiable, airtight, and convincing to others.
Now, would that not absolutely take the wind out of your sails? If you were just trying to make your first ever blog post, and you weren’t aware of all these regulations, or even if you were aware, but didn’t know how to work around them, you’d be pretty bummed out. I could imagine how it’d lead you to never make a single post in the first place. What if I told you there’s another option?
What if…a group of people got together and decided that they were just going to share their work with the world? What if they all collectively chose to not enforce their copyright, to allow others to freely take and do with their work what they wanted? Well, for one, that’s incredibly generous of them. And also, it exists. Please, allow me to escort you into the paradise that is…Creative Commons.
As just described, Creative Commons is the system via which creators freely share their own work with others, skipping over the intricacies and risk of copyright law in favor of more human-to-human collaboration and cooperation. “Creative Commons” is also the name of the nonprofit organization that exists in order to nurture and defend that activity.
By sharing their work freely, under what’s known as a “Creative Commons License", artists can proliferate their work and make it available to others — very importantly, while retaining their preexisting copyright. All “CC”, as I’ll be calling it from here on, does is facilitate the additional usage and spread of that still-copyrighted image.
This is an absolute revelation for you and your hypothetical blog. Now, you have access to not just the images you yourself created…not just the images you can get the copyright to…but a whole wealth of images shared under CC licenses by others!
But, as I said, CC works still have copyright, so you still need to credit them in some way. And on top of that, artists might argue they need more flexibility so that they can determine how, exactly, their work is used. That’s why there are multiple CC licenses to choose from. Let’s take a look at each one available to see what they each do.
CC BY: You can distribute this work, even if you’ve changed, edited, remixed it, etc, so long as you give credit to the copyright owner. Feel free to use this work for commercial purposes.
CC BY-SA: You can distribute this work, even if you’ve changed, edited, remixed it, etc, so long as you give credit to the copyright owner. If you do change the work, you must release it under this same license. Feel free to use this work for commercial purposes.
CC BY-NC: You can distribute this work, even if you’ve changed, edited, remixed it, etc, so long as you give credit to the copyright owner. Please do not use this work for commercial purposes.
CC BY-NC-SA: You can distribute this work, even if you’ve changed, edited, remixed it, etc, so long as you give credit to the copyright owner. If you do change the work, you must release it under this same license. Please do not use this work for commercial purposes.
CC BY-ND: You can distribute this work so long as you give credit to the copyright owner. Please do not change this work, make edits or adaptations, remixes, etc., but do feel free to use this work for commercial purposes.
CC BY-NC-ND: You can distribute this work so long as you give credit to the copyright owner. You can not change this work, make edits or adaptations, remixes, etc., nor can you use this work for commercial purposes.
CC0: This work has been given up by its creator to the public domain. Do whatever you want with this work, attribution or not. (Not for the faint of heart; those who release their work under this license are truly thankless heroes whom we do not deserve)
You’ll generally also see numbers after the names of these CC licenses. Those specify which edition of the license the work exists under. There’s very little separating the different number versions — just remember what the letters mean and you’ll be fine.
And a programming note: now that you have a rudimentary understanding of the Creative Commons license system, you can more readily appreciate the irony that the Creative Commons logo, and associated iconography, are in fact not released under any CC license whatsoever. So, to appease the copyright and trademark powers that be: my use of the Creative Commons logo a while back conforms to the branding rules laid out in the “Referential” and “Descriptive” use sections of Creative Commons’ policy page. This site, as well as this post in particular, are neither associated with nor endorsed by Creative Commons. See what a minefield this stuff can be?
Anyway, that’s what the seemingly random characters at the end of all my image attributions are. When you see those, know that I’m giving credit to the copyright owner under one of these seven license types. Now, let’s see a Creative Commons attribution in action, shall we?
Let’s say, for this hypothetical blog post of yours, you need a photo of a dog on a paddleboard. Personally, I use the site flickr to find all my images. Head there, and in the search field, put in “dog on a paddleboard”. Many images are going to pop up, but you go ahead and choose one that sticks out…perhaps this one?
It’ll do. So go ahead, click on that image. You’ll be taken to a dedicated page for that specific image. At this point, we need three bits of information: the name of the image, the creator of the image, and the CC license it’s under. For us, that’s: “Walkin the Dog”, Kirt Edblom, and CC BY-SA 2.0.
Now, what we need to do is write an attribution statement that includes all three pieces of information, plus relevant hyperlinks to go with all three. That’s the info that Creative Commons (the organization) recommends you always include for the best possible clarity. The phrasing of my attributions is actually word-for-word the one that they recommend, and it goes as follows:
Image credit: “Walkin the Dog” by Kirt Edblom is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
You’ll notice that the links are to the work, directly, then to the artist, and finally to the legal code of the exact CC license being used, a link to which can be readily found via Google search.
Now, the last thing you need to do: don’t go beyond the scope of the license, and don’t break its rules. An example, to illustrate the sorts of choices you make dealing with Creative Commons on a regular basis: you’ll notice that on this site, I use CC BY-NC licenses with some regularity. I’m perfectly comfortable doing that, since this site is open for anyone in the world to look at. I also don’t show a single ad on this site, making me fully confident that I’m in compliance with that license. On my Patreon page, where I make paywalled content, I wouldn’t even consider a CC BY-NC licensed image, since I’m clearly using it in pursuit of commercial gain. That’s the kind of context and information you need to be thinking about when choosing a CC license.
Anyway, once you’ve chosen an image, checked its Creative Commons license information, found the copyright holder, written the attribution, and linked the information, congratulations! You've successfully gotten…one…image for your blog.
And that is the secret magic of Creative Commons.
It’s not simple.
It’s not easy.
It’s not fun.
It’s not intuitive.
It’s not perfect.
It’s essential. Without a system like Creative Commons in place, the internet would be a much worse place — more so than it already can be, if your imagination can stretch that far. Creative Commons is great not because it solves every possible problem, but because it successfully avoids enough for it to have become “the industry standard”, if you will. That’s powerful, and it allows people like me, and potentially like you, to do our work without the constant panic of lawsuits and copyright claims. And to me, and to a whole lot of people, that’s a trade well worth making.
