Creative Commons: Sharing Creative Works from mrlsmath.com

My co-author, Brad Fulton, and I have created hundreds of articles and activities, and we share them with the mathematics community on our websites and at conferences.  We encourage others to use them freely with their students and share them with fellow teachers. Many teachers ask if they may present our materials at conferences, or adapt them for their own use.  This post covers some of my thoughts about the conditions upon which others may use materials from mrlsmath.com.

The following text is from the Creative Commons website.

“Creative Commons is an organization which provides a collection of free content licenses that you may apply to your work.

A content license is a document that states the freedoms and limitations that you apply to your work- an explanation of what someone can and cannot do with what you make.

Creative Commons offers 6 different licenses so that you can share your work exactly how you want to.

All Creative Commons licenses require attribution. This means that others may share your work so long as they credit you. There are some other things to consider when you choose to share your work with the world.

Do you want to allow others to make changes (derivatives) to your work without having to ask? Prohibiting derivatives might prevent others from making something really cool out of your original. But, this also means they may not use your work in a way you disagree with.

If you allow others to make changes to your work, you also need to think about whether or not you will require them to use the same license as you (”Share Alike”). A ShareAlike condition ensures that the terms you chose for your original creation are preserved, but also may limit how much the derivative work can be shared (and in turn, how likely it is for someone to use your original work in a derivative). On the other hand, Share-Alike ensures that your work is always used under the terms you want, even after many generations of copies and derivatives.”

I have decided to use the Creative Commons license called Attribution Non-commercial (by-nc).

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon my work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge me and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms. I read, enjoy, and benefit from others’ works online; crediting them with the original sourcework is something I always try to do so my readers can do follow up work as they wish. Please visit the Creative Commons website for more information.

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