Recently, I overheard some comments about whether or not it was legal to quote sections of news articles and/or blogs in a newsletter. Without getting into Copyright Law, especially as I Am Not A Lawyer (otherwise known as IANAL), there are ways to make sure that what one writes in an article or blog can be quoted or used in newsletters and other blogs. I realized that many people don’t know about the Creative Commons license, don’t know how to use it, or don’t know why they should use it.

To begin with, “Is an article I post on a blog copyrighted?” According to the Copyright Office , “Copyright protection subsists from the time the work is created in fixed form. The copyright in the work of authorship immediately becomes the property of the author who created the work. Only the author or those deriving their rights through the author can rightfully claim copyright.” So, yes, your work is protected under copyright from the time you write it. It should be noted that this pertains to ORIGINAL work, not copying someone else’s work. And no, a copyright notification is not necessary. However, if you want to allow your work to be copied by others, without explicit permission those others would have to contact you.

On Friday, July 22, 2005, Pamela Jones (PJ of Groklaw) published an article concerning “Why Would an Author Choose a Creative Commons License?”. This article goes into some reasons why individuals might want to license their works under the Creative Commons license, and place that license on their works. With the license already stated on the work, anyone can see whether or not they can copy the work, and under what conditions. This saves both you and them the problems of getting permission to use a work.

Creative Commons licenses come in many forms. All the license versions can be seen here (http://creativecommons.org/about/license/). Some of the definitions of terms are:

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

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

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

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

As you can see from the Creative Commons page linked above, there are various ways that the above definitions can be combined to achieve the amount of freedom you wish to allow others to have with your work. Another example can be seen from my own use of the Creative Commons license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/. This allows others to use my work as long as they include an attribution, do not use it for commercial purposes, and are willing to share what they create from my work under the same license terms.

This is called FREEDOM!

Information used in this post has been gathered from Creative Commons, the Copyright Office and from Groklaw