If you are a writer, photographer, musician, web designer, or graphic artist, chances are at some point you have worried about licensing, and how to protect your work. Perhaps you want to explore everything the Internet has to offer in terms of advertising and sharing your talents, but you don’t want to be taken advantage of or have your work stolen. Luckily, there is a middle road that combines artistic protection with the new-media freedoms of file sharing and collaboration: the Creative Commons licensing system.

Creative Commons (or CC for short) was constructed as a response to the need for a worldwide standard of copyright, especially one that would cover works published on the Internet. Fair use can be a very hazy topic, and certainly varies from country to country, but with a CC license, you know exactly where you stand anywhere, with any type of creative work. Aside from the blanket Internet licenses that cover works created in any country and are almost always legally binding, the Creative Commons organization is also developing a series of region-specific licenses that will offer full legal protection within a particular country or area. The list of countries already covered is vast, and more countries are being added everyday as license parameters are negotiated with local government copyright agencies.

The main advantage of a CC license is its flexibility. Perhaps you want to protect and lock your work fully, in the traditional “all rights reserved” kind of way, or perhaps you want to make it available in the public domain so that anyone can use it however they want, without seeking permission. Displaying the appropriate CC license on your work will let people know upfront exactly what rights they have as viewers or participants, and what rights you have elected to retain as an artist. There are many different variations within the licensing structure, and one of the most exciting options is that you can choose to allow people to use your work, add their own modifications, and re-share the modified work with both names attached to it. This works very well for things like collaborative work done across the Internet, or perhaps if you’re a musician, making your songs available online so that fans can download them, make remixes, and upload the results. You retain credit for your part of the work, they retain credit for theirs, and the creative process has more possibilities than ever before. Everyone wins.

Creative Commons is a tremendously useful and versatile alternative to traditional licensing, and can be applied to any work, online or offline, in any capacity. Licences are free and can be obtained from the CC web site, where you can learn all about the different licenses available to you, and choose the one that best fits what rights you would like to retain in association with your creations. So whether you are hoping to sell artwork on your blog, or even trying to protect the blog posts themselves, you can exercise your right to be fully in control of who uses your work, and under what circumstances.