Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Fresh Meat and the Creative Commons

Being a newly minted "fresh meat" roller derby girl, I was proud to receive my temporary meat name last night. The only rule of thumb for a meat name is that it be meat-based (or, for vegetarians, meat substitute based). Can you guess my meat name from this photo?

via Flickr Creative Commons license, by Lady/Bird
Anyways, when searching for a pic for this post, I thought I might make sure I'm up to date on my knowledge of copyright and use of others' creative property. Just like plagiarism of text, you cannot just grab any image from the web and use it for your own web site, blog or even power point presentation without permission. Copyright rules apply. Luckily, there is a wealth of material available that has been given some variation of a Creative Commons license. The photo above was found using the Flickr Advanced Search and checking the box for limiting the search to Creative Commons work (Google Images probably has a similar search limiter). If you upload your own pictures to Flickr, you also have the option of designating them as creative commons works, so that others might reuse or adapt it, as I've done above.

To learn more about using images and Creative Commons: http://libguides.babson.edu/creativecommons

Next time you post a blog or create content, think about sprucing it up with some visual Creative Commons flair!

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