Creative Commons license is what a person can get that is between a “full copyright” and “the public domain.”  Full copyright is where all “rights are reserved” and that no one can use another person’s work, where as public domain is the complete opposite (“no rights reserved” and work can be used).  Creative Commons license allows “some rights reserved.”  What this license does is allow the person to copyright their own work and allow the public to use parts of it as well.  For example, I write a book called “Sandy’s First Day of Teaching” and I want to post it on the Internet.  Of course I do not want someone to claim the material as their own so I decide to get it copyrighted but I still want people to use parts of it.  I decide to apply a Creative Commons license on the book and also make it acceptable for others to copy a page or two out of my book.  Creative Commons license allows this, unlike copyright and public domain.

Creative Commons license are valuable to society for many reasons.  Looking at it as a future teacher, it gives teachers the ability to legally copy or print important papers for class to help explain a difficult topic.  It also allows students to quote information in their essays or homework.  Say a class is learning about a volcano and instead of the teacher putting him/herself in danger to take a picture of one, now he/she can get on the Internet and show the class a picture of one.  With Creative Commons licenses, students’ (who are our society’s future) knowledge will be able to expand to new lengths then ever before.

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This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.