About
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About Creative Commons
Creative Commons was founded in 2001. It is a nonprofit organisation that offers a flexible range of copyright protections and freedoms for authors and artists. It has built upon the “all rights reserved” of traditional copyright to create a voluntary “some rights reserved” system. All Creative Commons tools are free.
Digital technologies are connecting people in ways that were never before possible. Creative Commons aims to help enable a participatory culture – a culture in which everyone can actively engage in the creativity that surrounds us, and in which access is granted to cultural, scientific, and educational content that has been pre-cleared for use by its authors.
Creative Commons uses private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare "some rights reserved."
Offering your work under a Creative Commons licence does not mean giving up your copyright. It means offering some of your rights to any member of the public but only on certain conditions. All Creative Commons licences require that use of another person’s work must be attributed to that person in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
About Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand
CC Aotearoa New Zealand is the New Zealand collaborator of Creative Commons International.
The plan for Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand recognises that increasing opportunities are offered by digital technology for content creation and dissemination. These opportunities include:
- developing new ways to create and share content in a digital environment
- facilitating research in and publication of born digital, multi-media materials
- providing good models of content creation in the digital humanities and encouraging infrastructure evolution appropriate to the needs of content creators in the arts, education and the humanities-aronui
- linking content creation in Aotearoa New Zealand more interactively with the rest of the world, especially through Creative Commons International
- assisting the public of Aotearoa New Zealand to become more aware of and take up the opportunities offered by digital technology to create and circulate material across Aotearoa New Zealand and the world.
High priorities are
- promoting the value of Creative Commons licences for the dissemination of educational content and academic research
- providing an online community space for New Zealand CC users to promote and share their work
- providing assistance to CC licence holders and users of CC licensed material
- initiating discussion about futures opportunities such as an indigenous Creative Commons licence.
PLEASE NOTE: CCANZ does not provide legal advice.
Te Whāinga Aronui The Council for the Humanities
Te Whāinga Aronui The Council for the Humanities is leading the development of Creative Commons in New Zealand. The Council as a national advocacy body for the arts and humanities-aronui represents a significant proportion of those interested in alternative forms of licensing which encourage the public use of intellectual and cultural property.
This Website
The visual design of this website has been produced by Sarah Laing and Nicola Nelson. Technical development has been led by CWA Project Manager, Bene Anderson.
