Creatures Caves

Again - a draft article for the resources section, listing some of the major acronyms you can encounter when looking for free stuff, and what they mean. I would appreciate feedback on what this is missing, if it's clear enough, if it's helpful.

So when looking for free resources to improve your agents, you may have come across a variety of acronyms.

This attempts to be an overview of some of the common kinds of licensing available for works, as created by the Creative Commons organisation.

The current view is that most things are copyrighted, with all rights reserved by the creator. A small amount of a copyrighted work can usually be reproduced for criticism or parody under 'fair use' or 'fair dealing' laws. After the copyright has been held by the creator for a long time, (depending on your country's laws), it passes into the public domain.

The public domain means that something is free for use by anyone for any purpose without restriction under copyright law - noone owns or controls it. A work can enter the public domain if the owner puts it there (unless their country's laws forbid it), and works typically go into the public domain a number of years after the creator dies. A work can be in the public domain in one country, but not in another, because of different interpretations of when a work should go into the public domain.

The Creative Commons is an organisation which "enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through the provision of free legal tools." These legal tools are licenses which allow the creator to say if and how they want their work shared, adapted/remixed, if they don't want anyone to profit from the remix, or if they want remixed items to also themselves be remixable.

Clear as mud? Let's go on to the common acronyms.

*CC BY (Attribution) - Lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon this work, even commercially, as long as they credit the creator for the original creation. The most free license available, aside from public domain.

*CC BY-SA (Attribution-ShareAlike) - Lets others remix, tweak, and build upon this work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit the creator and license their new creations under identical terms. Used by Wikipedia. If you use something in this license, you also have to license your work under it.

*CC BY-ND (Attribution-NoDerivatives) - Lets others distribute the work commercially and non-commercially, but does not allow people to change it. Credit must be given.

*CC BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial) - Lets others remix, tweak, and build upon a creator's work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge the creator and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

*CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) - Lets others remix, tweak, and build upon a creator's work non-commercially, as long as they credit the creator and license their new creations under identical terms.

*CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives) - The most restrictive Creative Commons license, only allowing others to download a creator's works and share them with others as long as they credit the author, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

Now that we know what these acronyms mean, how do we find works with licenses that mean that we can use them?

The Creative Commons webpage has a search page which allows you to use a variety of search engines to find content.

Google has features on the Advanced Search and Advanced Image search that allow you to search for images or webpages that are "free to use or share", "free to use or share, even commercially", or "free to use, share and modify", or "free to use, share and modify, even commercially". Google cautions that you should always double-check the licensing before using an item.

Flickr lets you search its repositories for images under a variety of licenses.

The Wikimedia Commons, a sister project of Wikipedia, lets you search by various licensing types.

Further free resources can be found in TheSecond's resource article on "Where to Find Totally Free Assets".