Creative Commons is a site that creates easy-to-use licenses for many types of art, such as videos, text, images, and music. It is designed to allow artists to customize the terms of such licenses, determining what others can do what the art in question. The logic of this system is simple: many artists want their work to be easily shared and even free to use for others, sometimes even for commercial projects. Creative Commons allows these people to submit their work, clearly establish the terms and parameters they wish to have, and publish it for others to see, share, use, and—if the original artist permits it—modify, adapt, or use as part of a commercial project. Creative Commons is becoming more and more popular and is an excellent resource. For example, we’ve used some Creative Commons images and videos in this site. The Creative Commons website also has a nifty search engine that lets one scan the web for media licensed under CC. Many other sites we’ve discussed, such as Flickr and Wikipedia, make heavy use of Creative Commons in their media collections.

Creative Commons is itself also a good example of how media licensed under CC can be a powerful form of interactivity. For example, Creative Commons utilized another concept we’ve covered in detail—user-generated content—to run a publicity campaign. The winning submission, a video entitled “Creativity Builds on the Past,” is, not surprisingly, licensed under Creative Commons and available for others—like us—to use. Because this video, and a similar one entitled “Wanna Work Together?” also from CC, do a good job of explaining the concept of Creative Commons and its contributions to interactivity online, we’ve mirrored them for you on our videos page.