Friday/Thing 13, unlucky for some!

I did actually compose a post about Copyright and Creative Commons (CC), but Blogger seem to have lost it somewhere in the virtual world. Blogger tweeted that they were restoring all the posts that they temporarily removed - but I'm still waiting, so I will try and put it all together again.

Copyright is one of those murky areas that is confusing and massively open to interpretation/misinterpretation, all you can really do (unless you really know your copyright stuff) is play it safe and always err of the side of caution.

Copyright is an automatic protection, so once you have put pen to paper, post to blog, music to tape, your rights are protected, you do not have to apply for a licence. Applying  a CC licence to your work does not change this. It is not a case of choosing a traditional Copyright licence, or choosing a CC licence.

I feel it is important to point out that CC does not replace Copyright Law, it tries to allow individual authors/creators to give certain permissions of use. Instead of telling you what you can't do, CC tries to tell you what you can do. CC are trying to work within the Copyright law to make it easier for authors to share their work and for the users to use it - see I told you it was all very confusing!!
 
Having said all that, I think anything that actually clarifies what you can use and how you can use it in the online world is badly needed, in theory everything on the web is protected by copyright, even if you cannot find an author/creator/designer of an image/page/website - they are protected, and you cannot assume that it is alright to copy, print or re-use without consent. Just because there is a print button on the page do not assume you have the right to print (murky and murkier I know!).

Check out CC's draft Irish licence here.