6: Creative Commons: How useful is it?

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that, “helps you legally share your knowledge and creativity to build a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world” (Creative Commons). My first impression of the website was that it was very colorful and vibrant. Definitely warm and inviting to people looking to share their work and those looking to utilize the work of others to create something new. After exploring the home page, I clicked on the option to search the commons, which brought me to a page that would allow me to search for content to, “…share, use and remix” (Creative Commons). Since I had the power to search for any random image, the keyword I decided to input into the search bar was “buttons”.

The result of this was bit confusing. After I hit enter, I was redirected to YouTube, so I went back to my previous page and realize that YouTube was selected as a filter for the results I searched for. I tried it again, but this time, I selected Flickr as my filter, which then, redirected me to Flickr’s website. At this point, I was bit confused as to how Creative Commons was supposed to work. How would I know that the images and videos I’m being redirected to are free to use and not under copyright? I assumed the YouTube videos may have been under copyright. Especially since some were from verified channels. I expected everything to come up under the Creative Commons website so it would be clear to me that none of the content was under copyright.

I decided to go back to the course calendar and follow the link there. That is when I finally got the results I expected. I entered “buttons” into search bar again and several button related images appeared. Like Vivian mentioned in her post, I was a little disappointed that the only results were pictures, but it was much more reassuring than what I was getting before. It may be because the word I searched can generate a board spectrum of imagines, but I found the results interesting. Some pictures were buttons for shirts, others were buttons for a machine, and even one pictures of a cat surfaced as a scrolled through the images. All in all, the imagine below was my favorite because of the political statements made by the buttons. I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for a button with a message.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In my own opinion, I didn’t find Creative Commons as useful as I hoped it would be. It may be because I haven’t spent as much time with it as others have, but as someone who has just been introduced to what copyright laws are all about, I wouldn’t necessarily feel safe using the content I was given when I initially typed “buttons” into the search bar. I hope, that in the future, the organization makes things a lot easier for new content creators who are rookies in the business of remixing text and such, to collaborate and share their work with others without fear of violating copyright laws.

 

Word Count: 512

Work Cited:

“Creative Commons.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 19 Feb. 2018. Web. 28 Feb. 2018.

“Search.” Creative Commons, Creative Commons. Web. 28 Feb. 2018.