What on Earth is the featured Image?

That is the same question I asked myself when I was initially introduced to the space of multimedia licensing. I later realized that the image simply shows icons of some popular digital asset licenses. Did you know that you can’t just use any image you find on google without checking it’s copyrights? Well – I kinda knew – but I disregarded it since I thought – “who will have the time to sue me for using some random image on my website“. Interestingly enough, I can in fact get sued if I begin to profit off digital products that others made without their permission – and this is as fair as it should be.

Creative Commons – here to save!

Like old me, many companies have been on the wrong side of the law in regards to monetizing digital assets without the permission of the author. In fact, the music industry is particularly notorious for these kinds of copyright cases. However, do not despair as Creative Commons is hear to save :).

Creative Commons is an organization that aids prevail over legal challenges involving the sharing of digital assets, by providing licenses and tools to allow any individual freely gain copyright permissions to these property. This means we now have free copyright access to a large repository of music, images, videos, etc. Isn’t that great! With this knowledge, I quickly revamped all my past web contents by properly attributing any digital asset that I did not gain permission for – Phew, now no one can sue me ?.

How can you access Creative Commons Assets?

Fortunately enough, you can access a wealth of creative commons products on the Wikimedia Commons site. If you are creative, you can also share your creations with the world and grant permission for use by uploading assets to the site. Interestingly, there are multiple other options to find these assets including filtering your searches on search engines like Google to only return assets that fall under the creative commons category.

In an effort to demonstrate how easy it is to utilize creative commons products, here is a video that demonstrates uploading a creative commons product onto a WordPress blog. More details for this video can be found on the Transcript Page.

Attributing Creative Commons Images

To attribute any electronic image that has free sharing copyright permissions, you need to identify the following:

• The Author’s name (Link to Profile)
• The Image Description
• The Image’s License (Link to License)

For instance, say we want to attribute the image of the balloon shown in the video. We know the Author’s name is ‘Marrovi’, the description is ‘Balloon from Zumpango’ and the image’s license is ‘CC BY-SA 2.5 MX’. So we follow the format: ‘Image-Description‘ by ‘Author-Name‘ is licensed under ‘License-Name‘. You can also checkout Best Practices For Attribution to learn more.

Plans Moving On