Last night I had an interesting problem. Some of my content was displayed on another website with no attribution to me as the author of the content. I wasn’t too happy with that, so I turned to my only legal resource, my Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license. I used the license as my backing when contacting the perpetrator, and due to its protection, the content was removed. Since not everyone knows what a Creative Commons license is, I thought this would be a great opportunity to explain how it works, and how you can use it to protect your content.

If you haven’t heard of a Creative Commons license yet, it’s simply a license that turns over some of your rights as the copyright owner to the general public. By default, all content one creates has a full copyright on it, meaning no one can use the work but the original creator. This is because the Hollywood cartels wanted to make it easier to protect their content. That’s great for them, but in the internet age, where anyone can create content in a matter of seconds, this becomes an issue. The internet is full of quotes and links to other people’s content. Just take blogs for example. Quoting happens every time a trackback/pingback occurs. So, on the internet, a full copyright doesn’t work too well.

This is where Creative Commons comes in. Creative Commons is perfect for anyone who wants to allow part of their content to enter the public domain, but doesn’t want to give up full legal rights. Using Creative Commons’ online license builder, you can specify how much of your work is open to the public, and any stipulations to it. In my particular case, anyone can display and modify my work as long as they give me credit, don’t use my work for commercial gain, and allow people to copy/build on their modified work. There are a number of options to choose from, allowing anyone to find the perfect compromise between completely opening their content and not allowing anyone to use it at all.

The best part of all of this is a Creative Commons license isn’t just some web movement, it’s a legal document. When you use the license builder, not only does it give you a fancy, easy to read page; you get a full legal document. The people over at Creative Commons have hired lawyers to write all the legal mumble jumble needed for the license to hold up in a court of law, and they have succeeded in doing so. Earlier this year in a court case between Adam Curry and a Dutch tabloid, the Dutch Court system upheld the Creative Commons license as a valid, legal document.

So, next time you post some pictures to your Flickr account, or record an episode of This Week in Tech, consider using a Creative Commons license. Not only will you be allowing people to use your work, but you will retain the ownership of the content. That way people can quote you all they want, but if you get one loser that decides not to give you credit, you have the full backing of the law to stop them.