[Commons-sense] Commons-sensical questions about copyright

[Heather Ford]

Welcome to the commons-sense list, everyone! Thanks for joining up - 

For those of you who I've roped in automatically, you've either expressed interest in Creative Commons before or you're already an expert who will be able to help answer some of the questions in this short 2 week discussion about Creative Commons in southern Africa. 

So what is Creative Commons anyway? Let me start by saying what Creative Commons isn't:

- cc does *not* allow people to steal another person's work and put their name on it;
- cc does *not* mean that you give up your copyright;
- cc does *not* mean that you never get to make any money out of your work;
- cc is *not* just for people who make bad art. ;)

Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation that has developed a set of user-friendly licences that people can use to mark their content as free to share, copy and distribute under conditions set by the author. The licences are (almost) water-tight because they've been developed and finetuned by some of the top intellectual property lawyers and legal scholars around the world. If you're lucky, your country could soon be getting their own jurisdiction-specific licence (South Africa's licence is in the making and people in other African countries are starting to join the movement slowly but surely).

The most common question that I get asked is: why should *I* use Creative Commons licences for my work? This is your opportunity to ask away - give us the details about what kind of information your organisation/project is developing, some background about why you're doing it, and we'll try to answer as best we can. Or just fire away with any question that you might have about copyright or Creative Commons - theoretical, practical or otherwise - we're open to suggestions :)

Best,

Heather

Heather Ford
APC Creative Commons Awareness Raising project in Southern Africa
Made possible by Osisa
Find out more about Creative Commons by visiting http://za.creativecommons.org and http://creativecommons.org