Creative Commons

This semester it seams I will be teaching one day a week at QUT as well as my regular three days a week at Southbank. Yesterday I met one of the lecturers Chis over there and he showed me around. I'm tutoring a motion graphics class (basically how to use After FX) and he showed me some of the work from last years class. There was some nice stuff, but I was struck by the broad range of content in the compositions. Chris explained that there is a way to search for images on Flickr that are free to use. Its called Creative Commons. Basically you just go into the advanced search menu and select that you want to search only Creative Commons material.

There are different levels of freedom, but if you can find one that only has the by symbol on it then you can go crazy with the image. Reproduce it, alter it, composite it, edit it, all you have to do is credit the creator.

I did a quick search for Lake and got over 80000 hits. All copyright free. That's cool!

Stormy Lake Thun by cfwee

2 comments:

Terry said...

Just to add, Ian... people allow their work to be used under a variety of Creative Commons licenses. Sometimes you just need to credit the creator, but sometimes there are other stipulations (ie. you need to ask permission, or you ned to send a copy of the finished piece to the creator, etc.). So check the attached license before you use a CC-licensed work.

CC is great! A good common-sense approach to copyright.

Ian said...

Yep. If it has JUST the "by:" symbol then you can use it and only have to credit the creator.

BUT there are three other symbols and if any of those feature then there are aditional conditions to consider.

Through the advanced search page there is a way to filter it to only find one specific catagory. You just click on learn more under the Creative Commons section. Its tops.