#15 Creative Commons

Very often we need to find

• music to accompany videos that we have made.
• source code to implement standard functions such as calendar, sorting, editing, etc.
• photos/maps for illustrations.

There is no point re-inventing the wheel. It is better to leverage on the wisdom of others and at the same time respecting their rights. But how to do it legally and with minimum hassle? Creative Commons allows us to search for creative works and their associated rights. We just have to be careful with the rights that they reserved and not transgress them.
The work's rights are coded in cryptic short form like by-nc-sa. Wikipedia has detail descriptions for them. The above music clip is from the public domain so I should be able to use it but not make money out of it.
Check out this YouTube clip on Creative Commons.