Reprint Our Articles Without Asking. Seriously.

What if you could take your favorite TechSoup articles and republish them on your organization's Web site — without having to ask permission first? With our Creative Commons licensing, you can.

Developed by a nonprofit group of technologists and legal experts, Creative Commons licensing is a free and legal way for copyright holders to automatically grant certain permissions on their works. In TechSoup's case, we're using the licenses to give you permission to reprint our articles, so long as you adhere to a few simple guidelines, as outlined below.

How to Recognize Licensed Articles

To take advantage of this licensing policy, simply look for articles that are available under the Creative Commons license and reprint them as needed — whether that means republishing the articles on your Web site, adding them to your organization's training materials, or printing copies for your constituents. Remember to follow the conditions specified on the licensing label that appears on the article, and be sure to include that label on your reprint.

All articles that are published under a Creative Commons license bear a licensing label. This usually appears as a line of text mentioning a "Creative Commons license" at the end of the article. The label may also outline the terms of the license. In some cases, the label will appear next to a gray, rectangular "Some Rights Reserved" logo.

On TechSoup, we'll use all three at the bottom of an article, like so:

In this example, the first sentence indicates that CompuMentor (TechSoup's parent organization) owns the copyright. It's important to note that Creative Commons licensing does not mean that the copyright holder is giving up ownership of the article. Rather, the holder is saying that some permissions are granted up front.

The second sentence in the example above indicates that the copyright holder has decided to release this article under a Creative Commons license. It also lists the specific conditions that you must follow if you decide to reprint the article. It's important to check these conditions, because they can vary from article to article.

In this particular case, "Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs" means that you can make reprints as long as you:

• Provide attribution to the author and copyright holder on the reprint. In other words, you can't say that you wrote the article or that your organization is now the copyright holder. You must clearly indicate on your reprint who originally wrote the article.
• Only use the reprint for noncommercial purposes. If you charge people to view your Web site or want to use the articles in a for-profit book, you'll have to ask for explicit permission.
• Do not modify (make "derivatives") of the article. If you only want to use part of the article or want to rewrite some of it, you'll have to ask for explicit permission.

Some articles — either on TechSoup or on other Web sites that use Creative Commons licensing — may have different conditions. For instance, copy from TechSoup's NetSquared Web site permit commercial use and derivatives.

In general, if you're unsure of what conditions are required for an article you'd like to reprint, you can follow the linked text in the licensing label to a page on the Creative Commons Web site, which explains the conditions in further detail.

The final component in TechSoup's Creative Commons label is the "Some Rights Reserved" logo. The logo alludes to U.S. copyright law, which states that copyright holders automatically reserve all rights to their work (which is why you normally have to ask permission to make reprints). Creative Commons licenses give copyright holders a legal way to say that they only want to reserve some rights. Looking for this logo on TechSoup or other Web sites is a quick way to find material that is Creative Commons licensed.

How to Share Your Own Content

Creative Commons licensing isn't limited to articles. Nor is it limited to large organizations that publish on the Web. Any organization or individual can publish just about any copyrighted content under a Creative Commons license, whether that content is a book, an audio file, a video clip, a font family, or any other creative work.

If your organization wants to adopt a Creative Commons licensing policy, start by examining the content you want to publish and determining what licensing terms you want to apply to that content. The Creative Commons Web site is the best place to learn more about your options, but, in general, the terms hinge on the following two criteria:

Do you want to allow commercial use of your work?

If you say yes, anyone can sell your work and profit from the sale. If you say no — for instance, if you only want people to use your work for nonprofit or educational purposes — you can always make exceptions for specific people in the future. (At TechSoup, we decided not to allow commercial use of most of our articles; however, commercial use of articles from our NetSquared.org Web site is allowed.)

Do you want to allow modifications of your work?

If you say no, people must reprint your work as-is. If you say yes, anyone can change your articles, photos, songs, and other content as they wish. A third option — "yes but share alike" — means that anyone who modifies your work has to republish that work under the same licensing terms.

Once you've decided on your licensing terms, the Creative Commons Web site will help you create a label that you can add to your content so that others know it's free to use. Before you can apply that label, though, answer the following questions:

Does my organization publish any content that someone else owns the copyright to?

If so, then you can't publish that content under a Creative Commons license unless the legal owner gives you permission.

Are there images, music, or other works embedded in the content that I want to publish?

If the answer is yes, then you need to make sure your organization owns the copyrights to (or has permission to license) the embedded works in addition to the overall content. For instance, if you're publishing an article that contains photos, the photographer may own them. If you can't get the rights to those images or don't want to, then you'll need to state clearly on the article that the photos are not being published under the same license as the article.

Does my organization have an existing archive of articles that it wants to upgrade with Creative Commons licenses?

If yes, you'll need to figure out how to go back and add your Creative Commons label to each article in the archive. This could be as easy as appending the label to all of your HTML files, or it could require a careful evaluation of each piece of content on your site.

Clearly, the more of these questions that you answer "yes" to, the trickier it gets to implement a Creative Commons licensing policy on your site — but remember, it's not impossible.

At TechSoup, we thought we had the most convoluted of all scenarios: A large archive of articles that needed to be labeled; a fair number of articles that we didn't own the copyright to because we had been permitted to reprint them at one point or another; and a strong suspicion that some articles with multiple components would need to be labeled differently. But once we got the project off the ground, it only took about three months to launch our new policy. And we spent most of that time designing and testing a way to track Creative Commons licenses in our content management system — something other nonprofits with fewer articles may not have to worry about.

Steal This Article

As a prime example of the benefits of Creative Commons licensing, we're releasing this article under a license that allows derivative works. Feel free to delete everything but the section on "How to Recognize Licensed Articles" and distribute that to the people responsible for putting together your organizations' training materials. Or, use the section on "How to Share Your Own Content" to help guide your team toward creating its own Creative Commons policy. Better yet, modify the introduction to suit your organization, and publish it on your site when you're ready to announce your own policy.

Whatever you do, take pride in knowing that you're participating in something that wasn't possible just a decade ago. Before Creative Commons, the options for openly licensing content were limited and difficult to use. And in most cases, if you were to reprint another organization's article without paying for it or asking for permission, you'd likely get slapped with a lawsuit alleging copyright theft. Creative Commons marks an incredible shift from those days — one that especially benefits nonprofits — and TechSoup is glad to be working with the community to help support the movement.

Now go steal our content. It's for a good cause.