Share and Enjoy with Creative Commons to Boost Your Brand

Image by: Hightech.Blogosfere

What is Creative Commons?

Okay, here’s the boring version: Creative Commons, founded in 2001, is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping authors of creative content work work with copyright to share their work in the matter they choose. Through free-to-use legal tools, content creators share their work, under limitations or no, with others.

Here’s a more fun (and perhaps relevant) way to look at it: Through Creative Commons, artists can safely share their work with other artists to gain visibility, network, and even offer their work to be altered and included in new works (usually requiring attribution and/or a share-and-share-alike clause).

Creative Commons can be an invaluable tool to the online self-promoter, and here’s how:

Sharing your work on Creative Commons

Creative Commons offers a simple tool on their website to license your work for sharing, and it’s up to you if you want to allow commercial use or modification of your art. You won’t actually be hosting your content with Creative Commons, but the tool will provide you with the html you’ll need to add to your website to display the terms of your new license.

Once that’s done, you may also want to consider hosting your content on a site that builds Creative Content licensing (and searching) directly into their front end. The wiki over at Creative Commons hosts a list of such sites, which can get a little overwhelming from the sheer volume. Here’s a list of sites FatBlog recommends to get you started:

Jamendo (Music)
Sevenload (Video)
Flickr (Images)
DeviantArt (Images, Text)
Lulu (Text)
everystockphoto (Images)

The question this all begs, of course, is why? Why list your work on Creative Commons? Besides the altruistic sharing-for-art’s-sake angle, or the creative I’d-love-to-see-what-others-do-with-this angle, this is a perfect opportunity to let your work speak for itself to draw in new audiences. Every Creative Commons license is alike in the fact that it requires attribution; meaning that the user must attribute it to you in a manner you’ve specified. Every person who uses your work becomes a new advocate of your brand

Using shared works from Creative Commons

Creative Commons offers a pretty decent springboard to finding licensed content, and much much more can be found via the links above. The potential to strengthen your own work by letting someone else’s strengths fill in your weaknesses are almost limitless. Use art or photos for the cover of your new album, or to spice up your blog posts; FatBlog uses Creative Commons -licensed photos from Flickr on almost every post. Use music to spice up your website or podcast; again, you’ll hear Creative Commons -licensed music in our podcast.  Who knows? Mashing up licensed images, video, text, and music could be your next great work of art.

If you haven’t already, check out Creative Commons, and tell us what you think in the comments. Or, let us know how you’ve already strengthened your brand with licensed content!