Creative Commons

I’ve always known of Creative Commons but I’ve never really known a lot about Creative Commons. Our lesson in class really taught me a lot more than I ever thought I needed to know about it. Creative Commons is a beautiful thing so you can bypass all the hassle of trying to get permission to use content. I know I’ll be paying a lot more attention to all Copyrights and Creative Commons that from now on so that I do not use some one's work in way they originally did not intend.

In this blog post I'll give my opinion on various photo and music sites based on Creative Commons. I hope you enjoy!

Photo Sites:

Flickr is a photo site that allows its users to upload pictures into albums to share with the internet. They also give each individual photo its own Copyrite and custom Creative Commons licences if the creator so wishes to have one.The advanced search allows users to search for a certain type of photo and, if they wish to use it, search for photos only with a creative commons.   Yahoo!, who is the provider of Flickr, has stated in their terms of service that Yahoo! claims no ownership of anything that is submitted to Flickr.

Open Clip Art is a website of nothing but clip art. Clip art can be used to spice up a presentation or anything that just seems dull, in case you didn’t know what clip art was. Their library seems to have a total of 34277 individual clipart, which seems to give a good variety for any search one needs to do. The whole website is under CC0, which states that unless noted all content is free to use for whatever purpose. That makes things real simple for people just looking for a small picture.

Commons.wikimedia hosts material that can be freely used under the Creative Commons. Its like Open Clip Art, just with text, photos, videos, etc. Commons.wikimedia is under the CC0, which makes things a breeze. According to the link on the “free use”, everything on the website is meant for people who wish to remix and reuse materials.

Google images is just a search engine to find random pictures. Finding whatever you’re looking for can be easy, just make sure your safe search is on unless you want to see “Rule 34” of anything you type in. Finding the creative commons on Google Images isn’t impossible, but its not exactly easy either.

Music:

Jamendo is the first of the music sites. Users are allowed to download and share the music on Jamendo; and paid users can have access to royalty free background music and music licenses. The music library contains over 333 thousand tracks available for free.

Archive we’ve covered before. Archive is a whole website of open source, free material for anyone to use. Their music selection is varied out into many different categories with a total number by each selection. 

ClassicCat is a website full of classical music. I think I like this one a lot, just because I am a fan of Classical Music. The categories are separated by each composer’s name so everything is easy to find if you know what you’re looking for. All mp3s are free for anyone and everyone to use for whatever they need.

A free to download site for children’s music. The site is updated whenever new music gets added to the site and their list of artists is separated into five categories titled “Artists 1-4” and “Traditional.” Practical. If you know what you’re looking for the site is easy to use....other than that you have no reason being on this site.

iSound is a site full of popular music. Type in the artists and it’ll show you a list of of songs and related artists. All songs on the site are free to download, but you are NOT allowed to use distribute or use the music you download for anything other than private listening. They aren’t very clear about that and unless you actually go looking to make sure, you can get yourself into a lot of trouble.

-Jess