confession: I don't understand Creative Commons

I mean, I get the basic idea: that instead of thinking about individual ownership rights to content, we can and need to start thinking about how to participate in collaborative communities. Creative Commons is a set of copyright categories intended to say to other people: I abide by copyright law and want you to know that I'm making my work freely available for repurposing, remixing, and sharing.




What I don't get is...well, okay, I guess I don't understand copyright law very well at all. I'm among the countless hordes who shamelessly rip songs, videos, and images and repurpose them without regard to copyright or fair use issues. (Interestingly, though, and in what I can only assume is a holdover to the antiquated notion of genius residing in a single individual, who is solely responsible for the content that erupts from his or her brilliant brain, I do my very best to respect authorship and ownership rights over print texts.) I mean, is it legal for me to copy an image from a google search and embed it in a blogpost? Is it ethical (never mind legal) for me to pwn a YouTube video and toss it into a Keynote presentation? It's not true, right, that illegally downloading a movie is like stealing a handbag? Right?



I'm unbelievably lame. So lame that there are heatwaves of lameness issuing from all around my person.

Still, this is perhaps a call to action for the kind folks at Creative Commons. I'm pretty much on board with the CC mission, and I've even engaged to an extent with Creative Commons licensing in my (now former) position at Project New Media Literacies. Yet here I am, eager but clueless when it comes to copyright.

May I suggest a guerrilla marketing campaign that's riveting enough to keep viewers' eyes drawn to the product and clear enough to offer a laundry list of the product's most appealing features?