You can find images, videos, artwork, music or other creative content to use in your written assignments and presentations by searching for Creative Commons (CC) materials.
Creative Commons (CC) is an international, non-profit organisation aimed at helping everyone share content with each other. They provide free licences and tools to content creators (authors, artists, musicians) that enable you to reuse, remix and share their work legally. Creative Commons makes it easy for you to use images, music, artwork and other content appropriately and attribute correctly. Read more about Creative Commons in Study Smart.
To find Creative Commons materials you can:
1. Search the growing collection of Creative Commons content including:
- CC search – search a collection of CC search tools
- Flickr (Creative Commons) – photographs
- Jamendo (Creative commons) – music
- 30+ places to find Creative Commons Media – audio, images, video and more
2. Use a popular search engine, such as Google and filter for CC usage rights.
Go to the bottom of the Advanced Search of Google. From the “Usage Rights” field choose the option that suits your intended purpose.
Using Creative Commons materials in your work
When you use Creative Commons licensed material you must provide certain information about the owner/originator, where you found it and the license conditions. A credit to work licensed under CC (attribution) should include:
- The title of the work
- The name of the creator (artist/photographer)
- The URLs where the work is hosted
- The type of Creative Commons license it is available under
- A link to the Creative Commons license it is available under
- Keep intact any copyright notice attached to the work
Sometimes it is difficult to locate the real (legal) name of the creator, but check the about section of the website and the copyright notice. If you still cannot find it, use the username or other name given.
Here is an example:
A search on the terms “jacaranda and Brisbane” was conducted using Flickr (Creative Commons), an option on the Advanced Search page of Flickr that helps you find high-quality, CC-licensed Flickr material.
The option “Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content” was selected.
Here is the image found with an example of how it can be attributed (below the image).
Exam time! by Jan Smith available at http://flic.kr/p/7ey4aK under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 (CC BY 2.0) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
As well as the attribution, don’t forget to also reference your image in the Reference List of your assignment/presentation according to your referencing/citation style on QUT cite|write.
For more information about Creative Commons visit Creative Commons Australia
