Collecting Creative Commons

Building an Online Collection

Are you ready to build an online collection of online collectibles? Have you already done that?

Maybe you started with a slideshow of pictures. Then you added music. Then you moved on to video clips and added captions. Then you started tampering with the video clips. You slowed down some parts. You speeded up some parts. You threw a little repeater on some parts.

Oh, wait. I’m just talking to my son here. He grew up turning our home videos into something like movie trailers. Here’s one, shared with the permission of its creator, Joshua Howard.

Watching the cohesive final product, I sometimes forget that it started as a collection of clips. Those clips came to a screeching halt when my kids became teens and hated the mom cam.

These days, a whole new world of footage is waiting for us on the internet. If you understand the Creative Commons licenses, you can collect and remix to your heart’s content with no legal worries. Does it matter if the collection looks more like a joke than a movie? If you don’t understand those license terms, then you could cause a mess for yourself or someone else.

For the last 20 years, Creative Commons has been working hard to make this a win-win situation for creators and re-creators. Check out this quote from their certification course:

Sure enough, the pool of CC-shared content is already massive, and still growing. How do they encourage people to contribute their creations to the re-creation pool? Vanity, that’s how. When we look at our work and say, “It is good”, we want to be remembered with it. They re-created the ancient byline into a modern-day license. It’s called CC BY.  These licenses are free and self-serve on the Creative Commons website. Here. I’ll put one on this article:

That took me 30 seconds. Isn’t it nice? It tells my readers that I own this article. If you click on the link, you will see that this particular license grants you the right to re-create and re-publish my written content in this article, as long as you attribute me as your “based on” source. However, the pictures here belong to other people. They all have their own Creative Commons licenses.

Which scenario allows you to legally reproduce internet content?

Juggling Creative Commons Licenses in a Collection

Re-using someone’s CC-BY licensed material is pretty simple, once you get used to the four rules. The first and always rule is attributing the source.  Then there are three options which internet donors sometimes add to their share license. They might insist we ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) whatever we created with their work. They might forbid us to modify their work (CC BY-ND). They might forbid us to make money with their work (CC BY-NC). You have to pay attention to the details of their license.

Creating online gets tricky when you use multiple sources in one new creation. One license might require us to ShareAlike and allow commercial use, while another forbids that. So how do you know what you can do with your final compilation? Well, Henry Ford, if you build something with many parts, you just have to keep track of your sources. If any of them say “don’t do that with my part”, then find another source.

Which would prohibit you from using a CC-licensed piece in your online collection?

Remixing and Derivatives

Speaking of modifying people’s shared work, are you my creative cousin? Have you been modifying other people’s creations ever since Photoshop was born? Has anyone gotten upset with your revised version of their work? Well, for at least the last two decades, those creators have been able to draw the line. Creative Commons licenses allow us to share our creations and specify “No Derivatives Allowed”. That’s the CC BY-ND license.

But what exactly is a derivative? Or adaptation? Or remix? Or whatever you want to call it?  That is a great debate to entertain partygoers. I would argue that we have derivated (heh heh, like I just did on that word) when our new version does not match the author’s original intention.

I had a fantastic example to show you. Remember those stamps at the top of this article? I framed all six of the Creative Commons licenses in those. However, in my due diligence, I read their legal terms and discovered those license images are trademarked and not licensed for sharing outside of their intended use. CC licenses all over this article are doing their job. Stamp stickers are not. So… I can’t show you my derived collection. Not in public, anyway.

In lieu of the CC license stamps, I’ll give you another example of a genuine, non-debatable internet derivative. Here’s an oldie but goodie that my high-school students used to sing:

“Sweet Brown Ain t Nobody Got Time for That (Autotune Remix)” shared by Stylakil via YouTube Standard License.

That remix came out ten years ago. Since it is still on YouTube, I am assuming News Channel 4 and Sweet Brown were both okay with the adaptation. And since the derivative includes many unrelated clips, I am assuming Stylakil knew a thing or two about re-using other people’s video clips. 

Certain modifications are not considered derivatives at all. Modifications that don’t skew the author’s original intention are allowed even under a NoDerivatives license. This would include copying a piece onto a different media format, resizing it, spell-check, and using just an excerpt.

Juggling Creative Commons Licenses in a Derivative

In developed countries, we lowly citizens enjoy the freedom to de-face, re-word, reproduce, and squish squash applesauce our personal copy of any copyrighted work⁠… in private. We just can’t go public with it, lest the creator dislikes the altered publicity and takes us to court.

That’s why re-creators steer away from any pieces that are shared with the NoDerivatives (CC BY-ND) license.

But for those of us with an internet footprint of adaptations, we need to be savvy with the licenses. We need to read the fine print, because the person who chose that license probably wanted whatever that fine print says.

For example, if we make a new creation from a piece that was shared on a ShareAlike (CC BY-SA or CC BY-SA-NC) license, we are required to share our new creation with the same license. However, if we simply copied that piece without creating something new, then the ShareAlike requirement doesn’t apply. I still don’t get that part, but hey, rules are rules.

A Collection of Borrowed Stuff

Let’s experiment with CC licenses. I’m going to stick with the easy CC BY license for this exercise. Here is a photo collection I am building to show the wildlife in my area. Initially, I am using all CC licensed pictures from Wikimedia Commons. What a great resource that is. You should bookmark it. When you scavenge in there, be sure to filter it by license permissions.

For this collection, it was interesting to see the same wildlife being spotted in other parts of the world. Gradually, I expect to replace these pics with photography by me and my friends. But in the meantime, these total strangers did me a huge favor by sharing their great photos. Notice how I made sure you can see that they came from someone else, and that you can click to find them directly.

Beware of Feral Licenses

Don’t be fooled. My permissions are not your permissions. Any of those fantastic photographers can change their mind and change their license at any time. They can’t take away the permission I captured here, but by the time you try to reproduce this collection, something might have changed. Make sure you get your borrowed stuff directly from the source. If it really matters, you might want to screenshot the license to prove it was there when you came collecting.

Proper Attribution

Do you remember the first and always rule of all Creative Commons licenses? Who do you attribute that to?

Attribute what?

Exactly. We must be clear about who said what. And who made what. And who allowed what. And where we can find those who’s in Whoville.

The goal is for my readers to be able to jump directly to my sources. Proper attribution has a TASL:

• Title (if it has a birth name)
• Author (even if it’s a screen name)
• Source (where you found it)
• Link (link to where you found it)

Creative Commons even made TASLs easy. All you have to do is copy and paste the author’s license. 

Let’s see. I’m looking again, and I do see a properly pasted attribution statement on each piece of my collection.

My collection! It needs a license, too. Collections are a copy-protected species. Yes, yes, it’s true. If you find it hard to believe, let me give you a more life-like example. Cedella Marley collected quotes from her father into a sweet little book called Redemption. Her choice and arrangement of the quotes create a thought-path toward emotional redemption. If the Redemption Song doesn’t do it for you, Cedella’s book very well could. That arrangement is a new, valuable creation. In fact, the copyright page clearly attributes our beloved Bob Marley as the author, and Cedella as the editor and copyright holder.

So in a less-noble project, I collected those pretty animal pictures. I made sure to include only wildlife that you would see in my town of Ponte Vedra, in the clearest view I could find. That takes research and judgment. That means my collection is my creation, even though nothing in it is mine.

So I must include a license for my collection. I wrapped the collection in a frame so you can see what I mean. I put the collection license at the bottom of the collection container. You may have already noticed it.

And what is my collection a part of? This article! I must inform my readers whether they can re-publish my article. We already did that at the beginning of this article. But now we’ve had a lot more to think about. Hm. Will you say you wrote it? Oh, yeah. The CC licenses require you to attribute me. Will you change my message? Will you make money off of it?

Well darn it. That’s too much thinking. I’ll just keep a CC BY and you can do whatever. Here’s another one, since they’re free. Have fun.