By Monique Litherland

Royal Valley High School

• Want to let people share and use your photographs, but not allow companies to sell them?

• Looking for access to course materials from the world’s top universities?

• Want to encourage readers to re-publish your blog posts, as long as they give you credit?

• Looking for songs that you can use and remix, royalty-free?

• If you answered yes to any of the questions above, then you should learn more about Creative Commons.

• Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools.

• Our free, easy-to-use copyright licenses provide a simple, standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work — on conditions of your choice. CC licenses let you easily change your copyright terms from the default of “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.”

• Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright. They work alongside copyright and enable you to modify your copyright terms to best suit your needs.

Give people the right to share, use, and even build on work you’ve created

Find content that you can freely and legally useLarge pool of songs, videos, scientific and academic material available

Opt out of copyright altogether and place your content in the public domain

There is no registration to use the Creative Commons licenses. Licensing a work is as simple as selecting which of the six licenses best meets your goals, and then marking your work in some way so that others know that you have chosen to release the work under the terms of that license.

Our license-choosing tool can help you select the right license.

Looking for music, video, writing, code, or other creative works?

Creative Commons has got you covered. Search for creative work through sources like Google and Flickr.