Copyright holders can offer a fair warning
The Creative Commons (cc) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the work available for others to legally build upon and share by releasing several copyright licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. These licenses may restrict only certain rights or even none of the work enabling copyright holders to grant some or all of their rights to the public while retaining others. Copyright has two main purposes:
- to protect the author’s right to obtain commercial benefit from valuable work; and
- to protect the author’s right to control how a work is used.
Sometimes copyright holders need more flexibility than the default “all rights reserved” of copyright law. A Creative Commons license defines how people can use the work beyond the dictates of fair use but without their having to negotiate a unique license withe the copyright holder. Four conditions exist that you can choose to apply to a Creative Commons license in 6 different combinations:
- Attribution: You can use the work but you must give credit tot he copyright holder;
- Noncommercial: You can use the work if you do not gain monetarily from it;
- No derivative works: You can use the work only without altering or transforming it beyound the provisons of fair use; and
- Share alike: you can transform a work as long as you make the resulting work available on the same terms as the written work.
Copyright holders should offer a clear concise copyright policy on their site. Posting a fair warning may reduce plagiarism, produce a favorable legal climate, and prevent confusion among potential plagiarists. If a copyright is posted, no one can say they were operating out of ignorance. A Creative Commons license on a site provides RDF/XML metadata that describes the license and the work which makes it easier to automatically process and locate licensed work. After choosing the license, the correct code can be generated at the Creative Commons website and posted into the code of the appropriate site. Plug-ins exist for users to select a license and install it in the site using Administrative options. Smashing magazine has a comprehensive article about copyright issues.
The Site copyright policy by MainHeading, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.