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Public Speaking - Takahashi: Creative Commons Licenses

This guide is designed to help students prepare for their informative and persuasive speeches.

About this page

Creative Commons Licenses (CC) allow creators to define how their content can be used. See the tabs and infographic below to understand why these licenses exist, how they are applied, and to become familiar with CC symbols. Use the links that follow to help find images for your assignment.

Creative Commons - About, benefits, and use

Graphic depicting Creative Commons licenses. See Tab 2 for the labels of the infographic.You may have seen the CC symbol around a lot, especially online.

Creative Commons, a renowned, non-profit organization, launched a set of Creative Commons (CC) licenses. These, depicted on the infographic, cover the most open level of reuse, through to quite restrictive.

In a nutshell, the CC licenses benefits:

  • Creators: Allows another to share and/or adapt your work without having to request permission from you, as long as they follow the rules for that license.  
  • Users: If you see a work that you want to reuse, you just need to adhere to the rules of the license. You don't contact the creator for permission - unless you want to reuse the work beyond the license stipulations.

Formally, Creative Commons asserts that the CC licenses:

"forge a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates. Our tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law."

This short video by Noble (2015), gives an overview of Creative Commons (CC) and the different types of licenses you can use to distribute your works.

Credit: Max Noble

Finding Images

 

Bing: search images and limit results using the "License" dropdown menu

Cover Browser: view 450,000+ covers of comics, books & more

everystockphoto: a search engine for free photos; this site requires you to sign-up for a free account to download photos

Flickr: find photos and use the "Any license" menu to filter search results 

IconArchive: archive of icons to download with multiple usage options. Be sure to read the license information. 

Internet Archive: a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more

Pexels: search for videos and images. Click the "License" tab to learn about limitations on use

Pixabay: find photos, illustrations, videos, and more. Select an item to read the terms of use

Public Domain Photos: 5,000+ images

Stocksnap: provides images that are free to use with no attribution required

​Unsplash: provides images that are entirely free to use however you want, including commercially

Vintage Ad Browser: collection of vintage ads from a variety of sources, including comic books, CD-Roms, websites, APIs, your submissions, book, magazine & comic book scans, and more

Wikimedia Commons: almost 11.5 million images available