This week I want to go over what I have learned in class about copyright, creative commons, and attribution.

What is copyright?

From the reading assignments web article The Cyberlaw Guide to Protest Art: Copyright, an explanation of what copyright is, what I understand copyright to be is the legal protection of a person’s creative works. Those works could be any kind of art; meaning drawings, music, videos, photos, writing, etc. The copy right protection means that only the creator/owner of the work, unless they give permission to someone, has the sole right to sell their work. Preventing someone else from copying their work and selling it for themselves. The purpose is to ensure that people who spend time, money, and effort on creating something will get to make money buy selling their work. If as soon as someone created something new, everyone could just copy it and sell it as their own, the creator would lose a lot of the profit.

What is the Creative Commons?

I chose the creative commons: CC BY-NC 4.0 Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license because the blogs on this subdomain are all projects for the University of Mary Washington Intro to Digital Studies: DGST 101 Course. Since they are all school projects, I chose to make the work in this blog to be the most permissive. By doing so, re-users have the most freedom to, as creative commons summarizes: “to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator” creativecommons.org summarized explanation of the six types of creative commons licenses.

What about attribution?

Attribution is when you cite the creator when you use, quote, talk about someone’s work. Some people will state on their website how they want to be cited, you will see that on peer reviewed journals also. If they do not specify or you cannot find the original creator, you do you best to cite where you found it. Essentially, you are giving them credit for their work. However, some people will chose not to share their work for free, generally you will see a watermarked or reduced image posted on their website. Some work can be considered “public domain” if the copyright has expired, has been removed by the creator, or was produced by the government. However, it is still good practice to cite whenever possible.

What about “fair use”?

This gets tricky, typically you are not allowed to use another person’s work for your own gain. Unless you are criticizing it, because it would be unreasonable to have to ask permission of someone to write negatively about their work. However, using a work and transforming it into something else is generally considered fair use. As well as using it for educational purposes. A good example of fair use is Calvin and Hobbes, a common sticker seen on the back of cars is a depiction of Calvin urinating on a logo. According to the Palette Swap web article by Kevin Podas the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson did object to the depiction of Calvin Urinating. Only later did he decide to allow that image to be considered fair use. The bottom line is, be sure cite the creators whenever possible and do you due diligence prior to using someone’s work.