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STDA 115: Lens-Based Communication

Research guide for STDA 115.

Creative Commons Licenses

Creative Commons licenses allow creators to make a license that gives you the right to do different things with their creations.  Creative Commons allows you to do more with other people's work than copyright.

There are six different license types, but not all will be helpful for your work.  The four major elements are:

  1. Attribution (BY) - you must credit the creator of the work you are using
  2. ShareAlike (SA) - you must license your work under the same Creative Commons license if you use material from a SA license
  3. NoDerivs (ND) - you cannot change the material and it must presented whole in your work
  4. NonCommercial (NC) - you cannot use this material for commercial projects

The four elements combine to make the six license types.  The licenses that will be helpful for your projects are below (from most helpful to least helpful):

  1. Attribution - CC BY
  2. Attribution NonCommercial - CC BY NC
  3. Attribution ShareAlike - CC BY SA
  4. Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike - CC BY NC SA

These two licenses aren't helpful for your projects since they don't allow you to make derivatives (i.e., remix their material into your project):

  1. Attribution NoDerivs - CC BY ND
  2. Attribution NonCommercial NoDervis - CC BY NC ND

To see more about the individual licenses, click the link below:

What Is Fair Use?

Fair use may not be what you expect. Whether or not you are within the boundaries of fair use depends on the facts of your particular situation. What exactly are you using? How widely are you sharing the materials? Are you confining your work to the nonprofit environment of the university?

To determine whether you are within fair use, the law calls for a balanced application of these four factors:

  1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
  2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
  3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
  4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Information in this box comes from the Columbia University Copyright Advisory Office and is "used under a Creative Commons BY license from the Copyright Advisory Office of Columbia University, Kenneth D. Crews, director."