Recently Sitepoint ran an excellent list of creative commons resources. Creative commons is a “spirit” (as well as a license and organization) that generally says, “I’m sharing these resources with you. Please use them with care and don’t try to resell them.” The goal is to lift some of the restrictions that limit the use of online materials, making this a “care and share” kind of space. Common sense etiquette should tell you that this is not an open invitation to take anything you can get your hands on. This is a gracious way for you and I to share our resources with others in a courteous and thoughtful manner.
Per Wikipedia,
“Creative Commons licenses contain four major permissions:
- Attribution (by) requires users to attribute a work’s original author. All Creative Commons licenses contain this option, but some now-deprecated licenses did not contain this component.
- Authors can either not restrict modification, or use Share-alike (sa), which is a copyleft requirement that requires that any derived works be licensed under the same license, or No derivatives (nd), which requires that the work not be modified.
- Non-commercial (nc) requires that the work not be used for commercial purposes.
As of the current versions, all Creative Commons licenses allow the “core right” to redistribute a work for non-commercial purposes without modification. The Non-commercial and No derivatives options will make a work non-free.”
It’s always a good rule of thumb to double-check on any online resources that you are planning to use. Do you need permission? Has the owner asked you to cite them as a source? Can you use the item at all? When in doubt, ask if you can. Flickr operates under a basic creative commons license, but again, it’s always good to check before taking.
For those of us inclined to pay for images, there are also several inexpensive stock photo, video and music sites including istock.com, Getty Images and FotoSearch.com.
