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Creative Commons Australia

Offering a ‘some rights reserved’ copyright system for copyright works

Read the interview with Jessica Coates, Project Manager

Creative Commons Australia is the affiliate that supports Creative Commons in Australia and administers the Australian Creative Commons licences. CC Australia is based at the Queensland University of Technology and is led by Professor Brian Fitzgerald (Professor of Intellectual Property and Innovation) and Tom Cochrane (Deputy Vice Chancellor, Technology, Information and Learning Support).

Building upon the ‘all rights reserved’ of conventional copyright models, Creative Commons (CC) has developed a ‘some rights reserved’ model for managing copyright. It consists of a series of voluntary licences allowing authors and artists to reserve some rights whilst permitting future use by others, under certain conditions. The licences provide a way to give permission in advance to the world at large to use material protected by copyright.

Additionally, popular international websites such as Flickr and YouTube have incorporated options for users to license their photographs and videos under a Creative Commons licence. Flickr allows searching by licence terms so that only photographs free to use will be retrieved. As at early October 2011, 100 million of the one billion photographs available on Flickr are Creative Commons licensed.

Creative Commons is an international non-profit organisation that provides free licences and tools that copyright owners can use to allow others to share, reuse and remix their material, legally.

Last updated by Rebecca Smith (2011-10-29)