YouTube Now Lets You Search for and Assign Creative Commons Licenses

Creators and remixers now have have a great new option to share and play with content, without worrying about copyright. YouTube has introduced a feature in its Video Editor that allows users to assign a Creative Commons license (CC-BY) to their videos. To mark videos with a CC license, simply click the radio button labeled "Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)" at the time of uploading, or go to My Videos,  select edit for the video for which you wish to assign the CC license, scroll down to Broadcasting and Sharing Options, and select the CC option.

Those wishing to find content they may use under a CC license can find it in the Video Editor by simply clicking the CC tab at the top of the page. You can conduct a keyword search, with only CC-licensed videos appearing among the search results. To add a video to your storyboard, click on the 'plus' symbol (+) and remix away!

For more information, including important details about the rights and responsibilities involved, see YouTube's page on Creative Commons. You can view the terms of the CC-BY license at the Creative Commons Web site.

14 Tools to Teach about Creative Commons

Creative Commons licenses facilitate access to all kinds of media works for use in creative and scholarly pursuits, but they also provide individuals who create works (whether text, image, sound, or video-based) more flexibility in how they wish to share these works with others.  With the growing prevalence of digital media, copyright ethics is an increasingly important matter for creators, users, and educators to understand and appreciate.  Over at the The Clever Sheep, Rodd Lucier has shared 14 Tools to Teach about Creative Commons.   The sections are Creative Commons Toolkits, Great Places to Host and License Your Creative Work, Video Explanations of The Creative Commons, Creative Commons Audio Sources, My Favourite Open Source Projects, Slideshow Explanations for Education, Creative Commons Social Networks, and Late Additions.

Under late additions, the presentation Creative Commons: What every Educator needs to know is particularly useful to anyone involved in instruction, asking questions such as "How do we model academic integrity?" and "How can we teach 'creative integrity'?"

Via the always informative Ellyssa Kroski at iLibrarian.

Image: Temari 09, Learning time, 2009. From Flickr, some rights reserved under an Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic Creative Commons license.

WorldImages: 75,000 Images from California State University

Scholars and students who study visual culture should be aware of WorldImages, a free and growing resource offering images for use in teaching, scholarship, and research.  WorldImages is a remarkable project initiated and directed by Dr. Kathleen Cohen of California State University.  Over the years she has photographed works related to her teaching, first in the form of slides and more recently in digital format.  As the collection has grown to nearly 75,000 images, so have its contributors.  This is an impressive and inspiring model of collaboration, and a generous example of academic sharing.  As its title suggests, the image collection covers a very broad range of cultures and historical periods.  Check it out!

There are a number of ways to search the collection.  You can browse the collections by themed groups called portfolios, including community portfolios, which comprise interesting and useful sets compiled by community members.  You can also search by keyword, advanced, quick, date, and creator biography searches.  More information is available at the Help and Tutorials pages.

How can these images be used? "Faculty from many disciplines are using the images for research assignments, to create course study pages, to include in their lectures and to create on-line materials. Students are using the image database for study and research, for term papers, and to create collaborative multimedia presentations."

Image: Anonymous, Roman Republican/Early Imperial. Mosaic, Theater masks. Rome, Italy. ©Kathleen Cohen. Work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.

Speaking of Art, Creative Commons, Copyright, and Copyleft...

Copyleft visionary and Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig has just made his book Remix available for downloading free of charge under a Creative Commons license. It is available through the Bloomsbury Academic Press.

This book addresses the copyright war between an old read-only culture and establishment, in which passive consumers buy copyrighted products such as books, music, and movies, and a new, collaborative, and digital read-write era, where materials are freely shared and creatively modified (think YouTube, for example). Lessig believes that this copyright war is unnecessary and counterproductive. He argues that these two models can coexist in a hybrid economy. Without abandoning the idea of intellectual property, we need to encourage stakeholders to reconceive copyright by recognizing and embracing new read-write models that can actually benefit all parties.

30+ Places To Find Creative Commons Media

Have you ever created a video for which you have needed sound effects or soundtrack music? Do you want to find free images that you can use on your Web site? Over at SitePoint, Sean P. Aune has just posted 30+ Places to Find Creative Commons Media. This very useful compilation includes links to CC resources that include audio, images, texts, and videos.

A sign of the times: one of the resources cited is the Usage Rights feature of Google's Advanced Search, which enables Google searches for CC content.

A reminder about Creative Commons: works offered under CC licenses are meant for sharing free of charge. However, there are several varieties of licenses from which creators may choose, each with its own conditions (such as required attribution, noncommercial use, or no derivatives). Don't forget to check out the CC link for these resources if you plan to use them in any way-- part of the brilliance of Creative Commons licenses is that the terms of use are uniformly simple and easy to understand.

Link via Ellyssa Kroski at iLibrarian

Image: The Temple of Heaven, Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. From www.photoeverywhere.co.uk, some rights reserved under a Creative Commons license.

Start Playing a YouTube Video at the Point of Your Choosing

Have you ever wanted to view a portion a YouTube video starting from any point other than the beginning of the posted video? Here's a great tip I came across in the Resource Shelf newsletter:

You can append to the YouTube URL (Web addess) the minute and second where you would like the video to start playing. The required format is #t=2m50s, where the minute and second values are your choice.

To illustrate, the URL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io3BrAQl3so becomes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io3BrAQl3so#t=2m50s. Voila -- it's that simple.

Image: from Creative Commons - Get Creative, posted on YouTube under a Creative Commons license.

Flickr Commons

You may recall that the Flickr Commons launched last year with a very successful partnership between Flickr and the Library of Congress. A little over a year later, the Commons now includes 23 participating cultural institutions. The institutions post photographs which they have "reasonably concluded" are free of copyright restrictions under a new Flickr usage guideline called "no known copyright restrictions."

Flickr describes the two main objectives of the Commons program:

1. To increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and
2. To provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge.
   

User-generated tags help enable broader access to these photographs. For instance, a search on "artist" yields 175 results, "world's fair" results in 104 matches, and "vote" yields 54 results. Visit some of these collections to see if they include images that you might wish to use in your teaching and research. While you're there, use your expertise and unique perspective to add tags and enhance access for all.

You may conduct a search across all Commons collections, or within specific collections. The current Commons participants are:

The Library of Congress
Powerhouse Museum Collection
Brooklyn Museum
Smithsonian Institution
Bibliothèque de Toulouse
George Eastman House
Biblioteca de Arte da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
National Media Museum
National Maritime Museum
State Library of New South Wales
The Library of Virginia
Musée McCord Museum
Nationaal Archief
Australian War Memorial
Imperial War Museum Photograph Archive
National Library of New Zealand
New York Public Library
National Galleries of Scotland
State Library of Queensland
State Archives of Florida
Oregon State Archives
Nantucket Historical Association
The Swedish National Heritage Board

Idée Multicolr Search: Creative Commons Images from Flickr

Forced to leave campus due to one of our typical Colorado March blizzards, I am sitting on my couch catching up on the backlog of e-mails in my inbox. There I rediscovered a recent e-mail thread from the always informative VRA listserv (and the always informative Susan Jane Williams). It concerns a fun and potentially quite useful tool from Idée, the people who created TinEye. It's called Multicolr Search, and it lets you pick up to 10 colors from swatches on its site, matching the colors in images from 10 million Creative Commons-licensed images in Flickr. The results are returned as batches of thumbnails, each of which you can click on to be linked to its Flickr page. Graphic and fine artists can probably imagine all kinds of interesting ways to use this application. And since the "some rights reserved" terms of use are easily located on the Flickr page, one can quickly determine the ways in which the image can be used. For more and related information see the Idée Blog.

Sketchory: 250,000 Drawings Available through Creative Commons Licenses

Sketchory is a growing collection of over 250,000 drawings that may be freely shared, in unlimited number, by keeping to a Creative Commons license. These works come from SketchSwap.com, a site where people from all over the world submit sketches to share. They may be used in publications, for example, providing the conditions of the Creative Commons license are met. This is another example of the copyleft movement, which seeks to provide alternatives to the restrictions of the "all rights reserved" paradigm of copyright law.

Image: from Sketchory, some rights reserved under a Creative Commons license.

Creative Commons Licensing

Perhaps you are a scholar looking for images to use in teaching, on a web site, or in a publication. You may be an artist wishing to create derivative works based on appropriation. Or, you might create work that you wish to share with others without giving up all of your intellectual property rights. The Creative Commons (CC) licensing system provides an alternative to full copyright; it meets the needs of creators who wish to share their work while retaining the rights of their choosing. Creative Commons, a non-profit 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable corporation, provides free licenses that address "the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved." The Creative Commons web site offers a simple online tool for creators to define their rights. The conditions they can apply include attribution, noncommercial, no derivative works, and share alike (which allows others to distribute the work only under a license identical to that which governs the work). Those seeking content with Creative Commons licenses may search the CC web site. Flickr also provides a search tool to find CC images available on its web site. The "some rights reserved" movement is an important development in the world of intellectual property. It provides more content to more people, helps build collective knowledge, and preserves the rights of creators who are willing to share their work.

Image: Sheryl Dee, Hirosaki Castle, 2008. From Flickr, some rights reserved under a Creative Commons license.