Creative Commons, Open Source, and Copyleft

As you will see, Creative Commons, Open Source, and Copyleft all promote the open sharing of images and ideas in different ways. In a sense, they challenge traditional ways of creating and sharing work, and they challenge the mindsets of those who believe in strong copyright laws.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons provides a standardized way for people to share their work, to grant permissions to use their work, and to ensure proper attribution for their work.

If you look at images on Wikipedia, for example, you may notice the words "Creative Commons" or the letters "CC" on the web pages for those images. If you find "Creative Commons" or "CC" on that page, then you can probably license the use of that image for free with certain stipulations. Typically, you will need to include the title for the image, to attribute the image to the original author, to link your copied image to the original image online, and to link your image to the pertinent Creative Commons license. That License may read, for example, "CC BY-SA 3.0," and the license page will describe how the image can be legally used by others. You should also include any information about how you may have altered or modified the original image: Resized, cropped, recolored, . . .

If you use images for slideshows or web pages, Creative Commons can be very helpful.

For more information, visit the Creative Commons website.

Open Source

What does open source in art mean?

Open Source presents unique challenges to traditional views on art-making. Generally speaking, open source can refer to the creation of software or text or imagery in a variety of formats by different people in a collaborative manner. If you open up a Google document and allow others to edit that document, you are essentially participating in open source. You are collaborating with others to create a text, so no single collaborator is the author and copyright holder.

Open source in art is usually digital in nature and open source artwork can be easily replicated by others. Instead of individual artists creating their own artwork in their own space using their own techniques, open source artists work with others and share their processes and their techniques. Breaking with tradition, open source artists tend to view the creative process as more democratic and less secretive. As a result of their openness, these artists challenge how art connoisseurs judge and acquire artwork for their collections.

You can read a 2012 VICE article on Open Source here.

Copyleft

Playing on the word "Copyright," Copyleft is a concept connected to Creative Commons and Open Source. Copyleft promoters believe in sharing imagery freely so that others can create derivative works from that imagery. More importantly, if you create a derivative work from a Copyleft image, you must allow others to use your work to create their own derivative works. In other words, you are not able to claim copyright ownership of your derivative work and then deny others the right that you had when you created that derivative work.

You can find out more at the Copyleft website.