As a response to the growing need for an alternative to copyright, Creative Commons, led by Internet legal guru, Lawrence Lessig, was launched in 2001. The first project of Creative Commons was the development of a set of user-friendly licenses which would enable creators to share their work under certain conditions. By tagging works as free to copy and share, Creative Commons established a means for artists to draw inspiration from a fast-growing repository of free culture.

Creative Commons licenses fall into different license categories according to the following conditions:

Attribution: You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give you credit.

Noncommercial: You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only.

No Derivative works: You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

Share alike: You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

For a list of each of the licences, go to this page.

Creative Commons licences come with three types of code - legal, human-readable and machine-readable code. A user clicking on the Creative Commons icon on the creator’s work gets the “Commons Deed” — a human readable version of the license. From that she can link to the “Legal Code” — the actual license that the creator has offered their content under. The metadata is the “Machine-Readable Code” that enables others to find content listed under Creative Commons licenses.

Go to search.creativecommons.org to find work that you can legally reuse and/or remix under the terms of the authors.

Creative Commons in South Africa

The Creative Commons South Africa project is run by a group of volunteers who continue to develop the legal tools and support the use of licences around the country. Many organisations have helped build the project since the launch in 2005, with many lawyers and legal scholars contributing to the initial and subsequent upgrading of licences over the years.

To licence your work under a Creative Commons South Africa licence, go to the ‘Choose License’ page on cc.org and make sure you choose ‘South Africa’ as the jurisdiction. The “Human-Readable Code” of the licences have been translated into Afrikaans, Sesotho sa Leboa and isiZulu by one of our local partners, translate.org. This is a useful list of things to think about when licencing your work under CC.

Users should include a Creative Commons “Some Rights Reserved” button on your site, near the licensed work. Help and tips on doing this are covered here. This button will link back to the Commons Deed, so that the world can be notified of the license terms. If you find that your license is being violated, you may have grounds to sue under copyright infringement.

To find out more about how the licenses work, go to http://creativecommons.org.