For those of you who maintain your own blog or website, you've probably discovered that a great way to jazz up your posts is to bedazzle them with a stock photo here and there. Pictures are attention-grabbers (nobody likes to read). Stock photos, because of the royalties owed to the photographers, cost money, and that can add up if you're constantly posting. Wouldn't it be great if you could just reuse pictures you find on the internet without paying royalties?
Now, before you go crazy and start copying pictures from CNN, you should know there are intellectual property issues associated with using someone else's pictures on your own site.
In steps the non-profit organization Creative Commons (or CC) with a solution to the reuse of others' creative works. According to their website, "Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from 'All Rights Reserved' to 'Some Rights Reserved.'" To achieve this, Creative Commons has created several standard "licenses" that a creator can grant that govern the terms of the reuse of his intellectual property. One of the most common CC licenses is the license of "Attribution." What this means is "[y]ou 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."
What does this mean for you? Well, it means there is a virtual treasure-trove of free images to be found on sites like Flickr that you can use on your own site, as long as you give credit to the person who took the picture. Just pull up the CC section on Flickr (hint: you can find it in the footer of the Flickr home page), and you can search through millions of these reusable images. Now pick the images you like and start pimping out ur posts wit fotohs of adorable kittehs. Of course, be sure to comply with the CC license.
