Creative Commons - Helping Students Find Content They Can Use

Now that many of our students are publishing content beyond the walls of the classroom, we need to make them aware of real world consequences of content they are using.

While it can be considered "fair use" to use copyrighted music in a class presentation, when that presentation hits the web, students can be subject to copyright infringement claims.  This rarely results in a lawsuit, but students can have requests for their material to be removed from a hosting site (YouTube, Blogger, etc.) -- too many requests and they can find themselves banned from publishing to these sites.

Good digital citizens will try to find copyright-free content to use in the presentations (and cite correctly).  A great resource for this is the Creative Commons Search:

http://search.creativecommons.org/

Creative Commons is a licensing system where content creators can allow for the use, re-use, and modification of their content (either with or without attribution).

The search allows them to find photos, videos, music, clip art, and other media.