Licensing

Open Attribute, a simple way to attribute Creative Commons licensed works on the web

Open Attribute - Creative Commons

A big shoutout from New Media Rights to the entire team that has put together OpenAttribute

OpenAttribute simplifies the process of attributing an openly licensed piece of content, by providing a quick link where you can get an HTML or plain text attribution. Paste this code or plain text whereever you are reusing the Creative Commons licensed work, and you can have a properly formatted attribution.

I encourage you to go install this right away and start improving your attributions today!

Data portability policies to ensure and open and competitive internet - an idea whose time has come?

Data Portability Icon - CC-BY 2.0

I recently shared the concept of developing data portability policies, standards, and best practices as a potential project for New Media Rights' Drumbeat San Diego event, and as project that could fit within Mozilla's larger Drumbeat initiative fostering projects that celebrate and ensure and open web.

This project begins with the concept that user choice, and user control over their experience, should remain a distinguishing feature of the open internet.

To maintain a healthy competition amongst online services heavily reliant on user-submitted data, it will become increasingly important to make sure user data is easily portable. This will help ensure that popular services make changes according to the interests of their users, and that new services can compete on the basis of their merits and usability, without artificial barriers to competition. Keeping data in the hands of users, rather than allowing confusing legal and technological techniques to lock upconsumer data, will help ensure an open and competitive internet.

Legal and How-to Guides for Independent Creators, Internet Users, nonprofits, and small businesses

Our educational guides are organized by category and title below. We also have the Fair Use app and 150+ video guides available.  You can check out our video legal guides by clicking here!  You can also buy our new book Don't Panic, a plain language legal guide that every creator and business should have when starting a project.

New Media Rights Guides are available to browse, read and learn from. They are organized by category and title.

Webtreats Glowing Neon Social Media Icons by Flickr user webtreats used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license

Best Practices for Creative Commons attributions - how to attribute works you reuse under a Creative Commons license

Find out how to cite or attribute Creative Commons work. Creative commons licenses allows you to share, remix and reuse the work legally, just make sure to check out the conditions of the license!

Sign our petition to support the Open College Textbook Act of 2009

Please sign this letter to your Congressmen encouraging Congress to support openly licensed textbooks by voting for the Open College Textbooks Act of 2009. You can learn more about the Open College Textbooks Act right here on New Media Rights!

Open College Textbook Act (S. 1714) promises seed money for the open education cause

The Open College Textbook Act proposes "to authorize grants for the creation, update, or adaption of open textbooks."

Specifically, it would authorize the Secretary of Education to award 1-year grants on a competitive basis to higher education institutions, professors, non-profit, or for profit-organizations that produce textbooks. The textbooks would be open licensed and available to be downloaded, redistributed, changed, revised, or altered by any member of the public.

Learn more here and then please sign our petition supporting the Open College Textbook Act.

New Media Guides Legal and How-to guides

Welcome to our Legal and How-to resource center.  We hope these guides will help you, the user/creator,  to learn about

  • Rights and laws on the Internet
  • How to use new technologies and social media in your own life

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Youtube puts ads on videos without permission

Youtube's filtering technology may be causing advertisements to appear on content without permission.  Besides the possible contract violations, the ads create catch 22's when uploading openly licensed (ie. Creative Commons) content to Youtube.   Youtube could have a significant effect on the future openly licensed video content.  This is appears to be a slap in the face to open content and step in the wrong direction.

Essential Free and Open Source Software Toolkit

A tool kit full of Free or Open Source software
Open source software has gained popularity because of its effectiveness, flexibility, security, and low cost. By adopting an entirely new philosophical approach to software development and user freedom, open source software empowers you, the downstream user not just to use it to perform a task, but to build upon, adapt, and modify it to fit your needs. In this way thousands of developers and users around the world are able to work to improve the software's effectiveness, flexibility, and security. Join the many people around the world using open source software, a way of life that encourages openness, sharing, community, innovation, and discovery.

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