The CC licences are a free and easy way for Australian authors, artists, musicians and other creators to share their creativity with the world. The CC licences clearly and simply indicate how their licensed material can be distributed and modified. This can help them promote their creative practice, reach wider audiences and, depending on their licence choice, allow others to share, remix, and build upon their creativity.
If you are an Australian creator, the potential benefits of using CC licences include:
- Increased awareness of your creativity: CC licences are widely recognised and respected, and CC-licensed material is discoverable by search engines and other online platforms. Because there is a machine-readable layer to CC-licences, your creativity is more likely to be found and shared when it is licensed under CC.
- Reaching wider audiences: CC allows you to share your art with anyone in the world, regardless of their location or financial resources. This can help artists to build a global audience and connect with other artists and fans all over the world.
- Building a creative community: CC licences encourage others to share, reuse and remix your creativity. This can help build a community around your creative practice and connect with other people interested in what you do.
- Getting creative feedback: When artists share their work under CC, they are openning themselves to feedback from others. This can help you to improve your art and expand your creative practice.
- Encouraging collaboration and creativity: When you allow adaptation others can build on their art, which can lead to new and innovative creations. Seeing how your art is reused exposes you to new ideas and potential new collaborators.
- Supporting Open Culture and “the commons”: By licensing your creativity under CC, you are contributing to the Open Culture movement. Your material helps to build “the commons” – a rich body of material freely available for legal sharing, reuse and remixing by anyone.
- Finding content you can reuse: There’s lots of visual art, photographs, music, sounds, films and other creative content you can use. CC helps you share, reuse and remix licensed content with confidence. Finding CC-licensed materials has helpful information on how to find licensed content.
If you are an Australian creators interested in CC you can:
- Learn more about CC: We have information about finding and reusing CC materials, as well as information about the licences and deciding which is right for you.
- Licence your creativity: You can add a CC licence to your content yourself, or make material available on one of the many platforms that allow users to apply CC licences to their material. If you aren’t sure which licence is right for you the interactive CC Chooser can help you decide. If you are new to licensing material using CC we recommend getting farmiliar with the considerations for licensors.
- Search for CC-licensed content: CC-licensed content you can share, reuse and remix can be found all over the internet. Finding CC-licensed materials has helpful information on how to find licensed content.
- Engage with communities of practice: Join the CC Open Culture Platform, part of the CC Global Network.
- Let us know about your art: Share your CC experience on social media using the #CCinAU hashtag when you post on social media or by contacting us. We might even feature it!