The Vertical Video Syndrome quickly went viral, picking up over  three million views on Youtube. Noticing the popularity of the video, Miriam Ross—an academic and filmmaker based in Wellington, New Zealand—decided to respond. With research assistant Maddy Glen, Miriam produced the Vertical Cinema Manifesto, arguing that Vertical Cinema was, in fact, a legitimate cinematic form.

Screenshot from “The Vertical Cinema Manifesto,” by the Vertical Feminist Collective, via Youtube. Made available under a Creative Commons Attribution licence

As Miriam explains, “The ‘Vertical Video Syndrome was very humorous, but when you see it getting circulated online, it’s used as a form of policing.

“We wanted to get away from that. We wanted to say, we have all these new tools, let’s see what can happen. It’s all very experimental. Hopefully the manifesto is a celebration of what can be done.”

The result was a close parody of the Vertical Cinema Syndrome. Replete with quotes from feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey, the film closes with six recommendations, the forth of which reads, “A Creative Commons licence must be used.”

The ideas around the manifesto tied into an honours film course Miriam was teaching at the time, on DIY filmmaking. “That paper framed the project. Part of that is trying to move away from the hierarchies around filmmaking–the idea that there’s a ‘best way’ to make films.

“We were looking at how people use the technology they have in their hands to make films with no budget or resources. Obviously, with DIY filmmaking the Creative Commons licences became very interesting. It tied into both the courses I teach and our project. Because we’ve got no money, we’ve been wanting to find material we can use for free. But we also want to take part in this Creative Commons culture that’s going round now, where people are licensing their work for free.”

Miriam is also interested in how DIY filmmakers remix and reuse other cultural works. As she points out, “There’s a lot of debate now, because video essays are becoming more popular. Film academics who are using video clips, and sometimes using voiceover to narrate the clips, and that’s could come up against copyright.”

As Miriam points out, one of the problems is that New Zealand lacks the broad Fair Use allowances enjoyed in the US. Even the Vertical Cinema Manifesto itself, which uses small parts of several copyright films, could occupy a grey area, despite New Zealand’s Fair Dealing exceptions for criticism and review.

“It is tricky. One of the things I teach in my course is mashups and video remixes. They are a huge part of our contemporary culture, and they’re all operating in this grey area. It’s strange because the companies, especially film companies, want their films talked about. The mashups are often a form of advertising for them, but they still aren’t promoting this sort of use.”

More recently, Miriam and Maddy produced Heaven, a short ‘vertical’ film currently under consideration for film festivals. “It’s an exploration of what we can do with very little resources and money, using new technologies.”

This film, like the Manifesto itself, was made collaboratively with friends and colleagues, and will carry a Creative Commons licence when released.

“That’s what’s great about Creative Commons. It encourages people to take something and just see what they can do with it. That’s the kind of spirit I want to see more of. Instead of trying to be an auteur starting from scratch to make something unique and singular, why not build on what other people are doing to create something that’s maybe more hybrid, but maybe more exciting as a result.”

‘Uttarayan Sunset’ by Meena Kadri/Meanest Indian, via Flickr. This image is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives licence.

Meena Kadri is a Wellington-based photographer, designer and Community Manager for OpenIDEO, a collaborative innovation and design platform.

A long-time user of Flickr (under the name Meanest Indian), Meena releases many of her photos under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives licence.  Her CC-licensed images have appeared in a variety of newspapers, magazines, blogs and books, and have been licensed for commercial use by companies like Phaidon and Apple.

Despite this success, Meena confesses that she “never actually intended to sell my photos—I just wanted to put them online. But pretty soon I realised the potential.”

While teaching at India’s National Institute of Design in the mid 2000s, Meena started using Flickr  to source high-quality images for her presentations; by 2006, she was using Flickr to share her own photos. “Flickr was the first social network I’d ever used. I realised pretty quickly how to optimise traffic to my site using tags, especially because I was taking photos of events  that were both in demand but under-photographed, such as the Uttarayan Kite Festival in India. It didn’t take long to get my photos on the front page of Flickr image search for certain topics.”

Ripe’ by Meena Kadri/Meanest Indian, via Flickr. This image is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives licence.

Her most popular set of photos–on the Uttarayan Kite Festival, India–has received over 50,000 views. Other popular sets include Indian Street Art (over 40,000 views), Back View Bollywood (nearly 25,000 views) and Faces of India (over 19,000 views).

Given the popularity of her Flickr account, her images have featured in countless blogs and presentations. For-profit companies have also paid to use her work, including Serendib, the magazine of Sri Lankan Airlines, and Phaidon Books, who included ten of her images in an Indian cookbook. As Meena explains, “what I usually do in these situations is negotiate. For those people with little or no money, such as NGOs, I usually say go for it. For others, I ask, ‘are you getting paid?’ The implication is that if they are getting paid, then I should be getting paid as well. For them, I charge my standard rate.”

Recently, Meena even licensed one of her Creative Commons licensed photos to Apple, her biggest sale so far. At the same time, Meena ensures that images sold to for-profit companies like Apple and Phaidon remain available for reuse under their original non-commercial Creative Commons licence.

As Meena’s images grew in popularity, she experimented with using Getty, a stock image service. While she made a small amount of money from the service, Meena “didn’t like that they required you to use All Rights Reserved. I tried it, because they do move a lot of images, but in the end I decided that I preferred using Creative Commons on Flickr.”

One reason for this is that Creative Commons licences require attribution, which is not the case with stock image services like Getty. As Meena explains, “The Creative Commons licences means that I receive a lot of traffic from having lots of sites—from major technology blogs like Wired to smaller community blogs with loyal followers—link back to my Flickr page.”

‘Backview Bollywood #7′ by Meena Kadri/Meanest Indian, via Flickr. This image is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives licence.

While Meena is keen to emphasise that the upsides of using Creative Commons licensing greatly outweigh the downsides, she has noticed her images being used without proper attribution. “Every now and then, I’ll find unattributed images and send a nice email asking for attribution. It’s important to be nice, as a lot of people genuinely don’t know how the licences works. I tend to assume it’s a mistake, and send them a link to the licence page.”

Other uses have been more problematic. While visiting her father’s hometown in India, Meena opened a major local newspaper to find one of her images used—for commercial purposes and without attribution—to advertise the upcoming Kite Festival. Meena got in touch with the newspaper, pointed out that they did not have a licence for commercial reuse, and was eventually paid her standard rate.

To prevent unlicensed commercial reuse, Meena only puts web-quality images on her Flickr page. This means that her images are good enough for blogs or slideshow presentations; those wanting to use her images for books or posters, however, will need to ask for a higher resolution.

As a Google Image search for ‘Meanest Indian’ reveals, Meena’s CC-licensed photos are being freely reused all over the web. At the same time, for-profit companies are continuing to pay to licence her work for commercial purposes–a great example of artists making money using Creative Commons Non-Commercial licences.

If you want to check out Meena’s photos–and maybe even use them yourself–check out her Flickr page. To learn more about Meena’s other work, check out her website, Random Specific.

Response from Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand to NZ On Air’s discussion paper, “NZ On Air: Online Rights and Public Access.”

Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand (CCANZ) is the kaitiaki of the Creative Commons licences in New Zealand. Hosted by the Royal Society of New Zealand, CCANZ supports the roll-out of the New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing framework (NZGOAL).

CCANZ welcomes NZ On Air’s discussion paper “NZ On Air: Online Rights and Public Access.” We believe that the paper is an excellent starting point for further discussion on how to ensure greater access to New Zealand’s publicly funded culture.

CCANZ supports the paper’s conclusion that “public funding needs to be better aligned with enabling public access on multiple platforms.” Following the lead of NZGOAL, we believe that opening up New Zealand’s publicly funded copyright works—including those funded by NZ On Air—would have profound cultural and educational benefits.

Currently, most of New Zealand’s publicly funded or publicly housed cultural heritage is unavailable for reuse by New Zealanders. Despite ongoing digitisation projects, these works are neither commercially available nor publicly reusable. This means that creators who want to build on the works of the past—from student filmmakers to non-profit documentary producers—are either forced to reinvent the wheel or go through a difficult process of asking permission, even when the original works are publicly funded and publicly housed and its creators are long deceased.

For this reason, we would like to widen the scope of the discussion to include Creative Commons licensing. Creative Commons licensing would allow New Zealanders to share and reuse publicly funded copyright works, according to a range of licence conditions. Creative Commons licensing would also provide clarity to heritage institutions and would help mitigate the problem of ‘orphan works’—those works that have no obvious rights holder.

By opening publicly funded copyright works, NZ On Air would be well aligned with the New Zealand Government’s position on open access and open licensing. Approved by Cabinet in July 2010, the New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing framework provides government guidance on the release of works produced by public agencies, specifically advocating the use of Creative Commons licensing for in-copyright works.

Cabinet approved NZGOAL because, as the framework states, “It is widely recognised, in New Zealand and abroad, that significant creative and economic potential may lie dormant in such copyright and non-copyright material when locked up in agencies and not released on terms allowing re-use by others.”

Since then, Cabinet has also approved the New Zealand Data and Information Management Principles, which are summarised as follows: “government data and information should be open, readily available, well managed, reasonably priced and re-usable unless there are necessary reasons for its protection.”

We recognise that this is complex terrain: given the mix of public and private funding involved in the majority of NZ On Air funded works, a blanket model is clearly unworkable. At the same time, it is worth acknowledging the unforeseen consequences of the status quo. Simply put, many contemporary cultural works funded by NZ On Air in 2013 are likely to remain in copyright until at least 2100, restricting the cultural and educational benefits of future dissemination and reuse.

A better system would ensure that publicly funded copyright works were, after a period of time, made publicly available under an open Creative Commons licence. This would provide a window of time for works to be commercialised, while ensuring that older, no longer commercially viable works were able to be shared and reused by the New Zealand public—effectively giving publicly funded culture a second life.

One way to structure this is to follow the paper’s recommendation of a sliding scale, whereby “the level of public funding from NZ On Air influences arrangements to get funded content made available online.” For works that are entirely funded by NZ On Air, and have no obvious commercial value but great cultural value, Creative Commons licensing could be applied soon after the work’s initial broadcast. This would take advantage on the Internet and digital technologies to more widely disseminate publicly funded culture.

Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand supports the efforts of public funding bodies like NZ On Air to open up New Zealand’s publicly funded culture. We also welcome further public discussion on these issues.

Matt McGregor
Public Lead
Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand
matt.mcgregor@royalsociety.org.nz

All that generosity didn’t go unrewarded: We sent out posters, DVDs, remix guides and–by far the most popular reward–our playlist of openly licensed music. Now that all the CDs and USBs have been at their respective homes for a few months, I thought we might as well share it with everyone else.

As I said in my letter to the donors, the playlist is a melange of openly licensed songs from around the world, crossing many genres, styles and cultures. If you like what you hear, I recommend jumping on Jamendo, the Free Music Archive and the Internet Archive and checking out some of the millions of other openly songs available for free and legal download.

PS: scroll down to find two special bonus tracks from the winner of the Free Music Archive’s Revitalise Music Contest. The winning band, Crown the Invisible, remade the 1911 public domain song “The Spaniard That Blighted My Life” by Billy Merson.

The Playlist

Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike

Tryad. “The Final Rewind.”

Brad Sucks “Dropping Out of School.”

Strange Zero. “Different Feelings.”

Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial

Aaahhhrchestra. “Denmaaaahhrk Compilation.”

Shoes and Socks Off. “Tork Sport.”

Jon Lemmon. “Harmonics (sketch).” (New Zealand)

Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives

Lilian Hak. “My Only Friend.”

Bella Ruse. “Push On.”

Emerald Park. “At the Mall.”

Disasteradio. “Gravy Rainbow.”  (New Zealand)

Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike

Abdou Day. “Libre.”

PlusPlus. “Game Over.”

Antony Raijekov. “Deep Blue.”

Bonus. “Odysseus.”

Dot. “IMF.”

Wet Wings. “Stockholm.”  (New Zealand).

Ghosts. “Grief and Sleep.”

Plastic Flowers. “Empty Eyes.”

State Shirt. “Computer.”

Public Domain Bonus  Tracks!

Dan holds a PhD in Fine Arts from Massey University, specialising in Mashup performance. In 2011, he performed ‘Breakfast Party in my Studio‘, a live audiovisual mashup piece, to the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. In 2012, Dan curated eleven different exhibitions for Radio Active’s Museum of Modern Activity, including Fair Deal, Interwoven (a 10 year retrospective of Alyx Duncan), and Having a Bit Too Much Fun (music videos of Simon Ward).

Earlier projects include Seance for Nam June Paik, 2008; Intimacy and In.yer.face, 2006; and Indeterminacy and Interface, 2005.

Screenshot from “The Wheel Between You and Me,” by Hollie Cooper, via Stray Cinema. Made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence.

Dan first used Creative Commons licensing when he became involved with Stray Cinema, an international open source film project, in 2006. As Dan explains “Stray Cinema operates in rounds. For each round, footage is shot in a different city, with a different director. The first round was shot in London, by Michelle Hughes. She decided to license all of her raw, unedited footage, before she’d even made a film out of it. She wanted other people making their own stories out of the same material, concurrently to her making her own film.”

After Michelle released her raw footage on the Stray Cinema site, participants from all over the world re-edited her work. Afterwards, Michelle’s was shown alongside the top five participant films. This also occurred for the second round, with footage shot in Barcelona. The third round took place in 2012, with a screening to be held in Melbourne, later this year.

In 2006, Dan also became involved with UpStage, a web platform for live online performance, eventually helping to curate online UpStage festivals from 2008 to 2010. This platform is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike and, as Dan points out, “a lot of people using the platform Creative Commons license the visual and audio content of the works themselves.”

Breakfast Party at my Studio from Dan Untitled on Vimeo.

These days, Dan’s main involvement with Creative Commons licensing comes with his mashup projects, which he releases under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike licence. As he says, “Nowadays, any music I do, I’ll licence it under Creative Commons. Some might debate about licensing mashups as CC. In my mind, though, this is in line with my argument that a mashup is a unique creation. What I’m licensing is my combination, my mix of this plus this plus this, in this particular way, with all these tweaks and changes. I don’t release all the source material that I used to create it and the licence doesn’t apply to the source material.”

Dan likes to use Creative Commons licences “because of the flexibility. I want to be able to say outright, feel free to use this, however you want to use it. For my non-mashup work I also like the ability to be able to set tiers of how I want something to be used or not used.”

In November 2012, Dan curated an art show commissioned by the Fair Deal Coalition, which included several pieces made available under a Creative Commons licence, including Bronwyn Holloway-Smith’s Whisper Down the Lane (read a case study of Bronwyn). Run by InternetNZ, Fair Deal is a coalition of organisations seeking to prevent any changes to New Zealand law resulting from the ongoing Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations.

Dan became involved with the Fair Deal Coalition because he was concerned with with how copyright law affects New Zealand artists. “I would,” Dan says, “like to see a lot more clarity about Fair Use and Fair Dealing, because that’s what impacts directly on my work. The current default when distributing work online is that you’re guilty until proven innocent… That’s not based on expert opinion, that’s based on a computer programme scanning the waveform of the visual content. As an artist, I find that really offensive.”

Dan points to the history of remix and reuse in  music. “There’s centuries of tradition in all creative fields of artists referencing each other’s work in various ways. The only difference is the technology.”

“It’s no different from a composer a couple of centuries ago lifting a whole section from somebody else’s composition and using it. The Baroque composer Handel is a good example – his work commonly quoted entire passages from other peoples’ compositions. There are countless examples of different artists appropriating the work of others, it’s been going on for centuries – it’s well accepted in all sorts of different mediums and artforms.”

You can read more of Dan’s thoughts about copyright, artists and the TPP in his introduction to the exhibition: Fair Deal: Copyright, the Public Domain and Fair Dealing in the New Zealand Creative Sector.

You can find more of Dan’s work on Vimeo and Soundcloud, or listen to Radio Active’s Mashup show.

On Saturday April 27, I’ll be at Te Papa for the Makertorium. I’ll be talking about Creative Commons Aotearoa NZ to some of the estimated ten thousand visitors, chatting with Helen Baxter on Makertorium TV–and briefly abandoning my post to check out the 3D Petting Zoo.

If you’re in Wellington, this will be a chance to check out “creators, tinkerers and inventors from all over the country,” including 3D Printers, the Anzac Periscope Challenge and the Eggs Prize launch at 2 pm.

The Makertorium will run from 10 am to 6 pm, with over fifty exhibitions and installations spread over eight zones.

As the organisers put it, “From Bristlebots in Dunedin to The Diamond Age in Auckland, experience some of the best tinkering and inventing in New Zealand. Visit the 3D Petting Zoo, learn about LEDS and electronics, watch battle robots in action, test rockets in the outdoor arena and watch Makertorium TV being made live in the giant Makerbooth.”

If you’re around, come say hello, pick up a poster and enjoy the exhibits!

 Makertorium is a joint venture between  The Wellington Makerspace, Makers Org NZ, Mohawk Media, Diatom Studio, pixelbrid and Marmalade Monkey, supported by Wellington City Council and hosted by Te Papa.

In February of this year, Creative Commons Aotearoa NZ gave its support to an exciting new initiative: The NZAU Open Research conference. Over two days, the conference discussed the possibilities–and practicalities–of opening up Australasian research, including the use of open licensing to enable research to be shared and reused beyond the (mostly) closed academic system.

At present, the public, including non-academics with advanced degrees, cannot freely access the research they fund. While it is widely accepted that this has to change, the New Zealand and Australian research sectors have lacked a concise articulation of why Australasian researchers and research funding bodies should support OA.

With this in mind, the NZAU Open Research organising committee got together on the Friday after the conference and came up with a series of principles and recommendations for open research in New Zealand, which came to be known as the Tasman Declaration. One of the Declaration’s basic principles is that “research outputs should be made available with as few restrictions as possible and as soon as possible.”

We fully agree. CCANZ supports the move towards open access and open licensing for publicly funded research. While, as last year’s Finch Report acknowledged, the move to open access will not be free, the costs of open access publishing are small next to the social, cultural and economic benefits of making publicly funded research available for all.

As the NZAU Open Research team point out, there are also benefits for researchers themselves: not only will their research be more widely read by the people who fund it–i.e. the public–but they will be much less likely to waste time duplicating the research of others.

And finally, let us not forget the universities themselves: NZAU Open Research cite a talk from Michael Eisin, which points out that, “Every year universities, governments and other organizations spend in excess of $10 billion dollars to buy back access to papers their researchers gave to journals for free.”

The Tasman Declaration follows recent moves towards open access and open licensing in the UK and USA. It is the latest in a series of regional declarations–including the Budapest Open Access Initiative and the Berlin Declaration–that argue that, as the Berlin Declaration puts it,

The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and economic realities of distributing scientific knowledge and cultural heritage. For the first time ever, the Internet now offers the chance to constitute a global and interactive representation of human knowledge, including cultural heritage and the guarantee of worldwide access.

As some of you might have already noted, this vision is precisely that of Creative Commons: to realise “the full potential of the Internet — universal access to research and education, full participation in culture — to drive a new era of development, growth, and productivity.”

Open access to scholarly research, including open licensing, is a significant part of this potential. You can read the story behind the Tasman Declaration here. The Declaration itself is here, and if you agree with its recommendations, sign it here.

If you’re interested in reading more about open access and open licensing here in New Zealand, check out our series of posts for Open Access Week 2012.

[The header image is credited to the Open Knowledge Foundation and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.]

As many of you know, InternetNZ are established supporters of Creative Commons licensing. For two years now, they’ve hosted Creative Commons meetups at their regular Nethui conferences; they also funded our popular Creative Commons video, which has been used to explain Creative Commons licensing around the world.

InternetNZ has also made sure that copyright works that are created from InternetNZ grants  are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution or Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial licence.

They even use Creative Commons licensing for their own work. This includes their website and this great video, which I’ve embedded below, making the case for an open and uncapturable Internet.

But before we get to the video — what does this partnership mean, exactly?

First, it will strengthen the ties between our two organisations, allowing us to collaborate more effectively. For a small organisation like Creative Commons Aotearoa NZ, it’s important for us to strengthen such ties.

Second, it provides Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand with the resources to provide more regional workshops, create new resources and spread the word about open licensing. In particular, we’re going to be focusing our efforts on open research and digital citizenship in New Zealand schools.

As Acting Chief Executive of InternetNZ Jordan Carter puts it, “Open licensing is becoming an increasingly important part of keeping the Internet open and uncaptureable. Creative Commons is doing great work in this area – notably in championing the freeing up of research data and promoting responsible digital citizenship through its open licensing schools initiative.”

You can read more about the partnership over at InternetNZ. Before you do so, though, check out their video, outlining why and open and uncapturable Internet is important for all New Zealanders:

Selection of ‘An Opal Dream Cave‘ by Jem Yoshioka. Made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 New Zealand licence.

With this entry, Jem won the Creative Commons category of Mix & Mash. As Jem relates, “That was when I began to think about how I could use Creative Commons material in my work, and also start licensing my own work under Creative Commons.”

“I then decided to open up my Flickr stream. Now, everything I put online I licence under Creative Commons.”

The comics on Jem’s website, including An Opal Dream Cave and Sunshine, are all made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike licence. Many more photos, illustrations, comics and sketches are made available under the same licence on her Flickr stream.

As Jem explains, “I use Creative Commons for many reasons, one of them being that I really do believe that copyright is outdated, especially given the way we can share things online. It becomes more of a burden than anything. Instead of encouraging creativity, it begins to block it.

“By using an open licence, it actually gives me a lot more freedom to say what I want done with my work. I don’t have to worry about people infringing on my rights, as it’s very clear what can be done with my work.”

Jem chose to use the Share Alike licence so “everyone that uses my work is also contributing to Creative Commons. It’s a ways of increasing the pool of work and encouraging the conversation.”

“The Share Alike licence is a way for me to contribute to the Creative Commons environment.”

“Doodling Onna Bugeisha. Female samurai warrior” by Jem Yoshioka, via her Flickr stream. Made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 New Zealand licence.

Unlike some artists—like Dylan Horrocks—Jem chose not to apply a Non-Commercial licence to her work. As she explains, “People can make money off my work. I’m really not too fussed about that, as long as it’s got my name on it, they can do whatever they like. I’d rather it be shared.

The ShareAlike aspect of the license means anything that is made, even commercially, also has to be ShareAlike. If a big company wants to use my work, they’re doing so while contributing to Creative Commons.”

“Being a part of a community also helps me to get a bit more traction for my freelance work. This model doesn’t take money away from you. It engages and connects people even more with what I do.”

Recently, Jem became a trustee of the Creative Freedom Foundation, joining other Creative Commons supporters, including Dan Untitled, Bronwyn Holloway-Smith, Matthew Holloway Smith and Luke Rowell of Disasteradio.

Jem’s next project idea is an interactive story that will use Creative Commons and Public Domain works as well as original illustrations. She will be blogging her progress over at Jemshed.

The Waikato Independent is edited by Charles Riddle, Lecturer in the School of Media Arts. As Charles explains, “We use the Waikato Independent as a teaching tool. What we’re really interested in is getting our students’ work published as widely as possible.

“We put their work up under an open Creative Commons licence so that any of the community newspapers or websites that like the work can feel free to republish it, as long as they acknowledge the student as the author.

“The idea was that other media would pick it up, because the more widely a student can get published, the better it looks on their CV.”

‘Dry Days’ by Sophie Iremonger from the Waikato Independent story ‘Business Dries Up in Drought,’ is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported licence

Other media are paying attention. In February, this story about a local talent show contestant, written by Caitlin Wallace, was picked up by Hamilton News Live; that story, in turn, was picked up by the New Zealand Herald, New Zealand’s largest newspaper. “It can have that knock-on effect that we’re not even always aware off.”

Another recent example of reuse is this story about a local Motocross rider, written by Corey Rosser, which was republished in Sun Live.

Faculty at Wintec’s School of Media Arts have introduced Creative Commons licensing as part of their wider focus on media law and copyright, specifically in their third-year Web Media course.

Most students, Charles says, are happy to give their work an open licence. Occasionally, a photographer will want to maintain ‘All Rights Reserved’ copyright; otherwise, as Charles puts it, “we keep everything open.”

But what about when students graduate? Charles notes that his students may not always have a choice to use open licensing, especially if they work for more conventional news organisations. “But if they’re going to end up in Public Relations, using Creative Commons makes a lot of sense, really. We have quite a few that go into that. I would expect that they would write under Creative Commons.”

While noting that Creative Commons licensing is still a new concept for many, Charles points out that the licences have been a success for Wintec’s journalism students.

“It works fantastically for us.”