Understand How To Protect Your Artworks
As you all may know, online fraud can be something that you want to avoid, especially to those full time (or even part time) freelancer in any of their creative fields such digital art, web designing, logo branding, digital photography, etc..
Putting up all your favorites and best artworks into hundreds of free online portfolio galleries can be a great exposure to your work and to your business, however how safe are you from being misuse by those Jackass Jackal? Some online portfolio galleries maybe have protected your work by providing some good + clear rights protection which some are maybe costly, but NOT many of them are actually secured you from being jacked!
As a freelancer myself, creating a good design alone is not enough, to protect your creative work is one thing you need to get really serious into it. We as a freelancer need to protect our artworks and Creative Commons can be your best solution to grant copyright permissions to any of your creative work publish over the internet.
What is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization - We work to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in “the commons” - the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing.
What are they provide for?
CC provides free, easy-to-use legal tools - 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 Creative Commons licenses enable people to easily change their copyright terms from the default of “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.”
Take a look at these symbols, and understand what there are for :
Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd)
This license is the most restrictive of all six main licenses, allowing redistribution. This license is often called the “free advertising” license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.
Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike (by-nc-sa)
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute your work just like the by-nc-nd license, but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.
Attribution Non-commercial (by-nc)
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
Attribution No Derivatives (by-nd)
This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.
Attribution Share Alike (by-sa)
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.
Attribution (by)
This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.
Some online portfolio galleries may have these license applied, which is already very good, but as I wrote earlier, NOT many of them providing the effective license to get your work fully protected.
Before you apply a Creative Commons license to your work, you should make sure you understand how this license actually work, therefore, I recommend that you read the Frequently Asked Questions to learn more detail.
Good luck.. make sure YOU protected!
