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Creative Commons
—Better ways to share for the common good
 Sharing and creating for the common good are major goals of The Dalai Lama Foundation, and that’s why most of the materials we create are offered under Creative Commons licenses.
The commons is an area in a human settlement that is used by everyone and “belongs” to no one individual. For example, there may be a fenced area in or near a town where individuals can graze their cows or goats. In the US there are historical examples, like Boston Common—where this was the practice in the 1600s.
The proper utilization of a commons is dependent on the goodwill and cooperation of all citizens — if one individual overuses the commons, then all will suffer. First described in 1968, this situation is called the tragedy of the commons.] Proper use of a commons depends on cooperation, and mutual respect.
Creative Commons “CC” was founded in 2001 and is a nonprofit organization that works “to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in ‘the commons’—the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing.
CC provides free, easy-to-use legal tools that give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The CC licenses enable people to easily change their copyright terms from the default of ‘all rights reserved’ to ‘some rights reserved.’”
CC estimates that by the end of 2008, over 130 million documents had been published under Creative Commons licenses.
Sharing and creating for the common good are major goals of The Dalai Lama Foundation, and that’s why we make almost all of our materials available under Creative Commons licenses.
ccLearn is a division of Creative Commons, that is dedicated to realizing the full potential of the internet to support open learning and open educational resources. ccLearn is developing brand new tools to integrate Creative Commons into open education.
Click the video box below (or visit CC online) to view a description.
OK, so what does this mean you can do with Dalai Lama Foundation learning materials? Well…
- As long as you give “written” credit to the Foundation and/or other creators of the materials; and
- as long as you distribute them without making a profit (though you can recover the cost of printing or distribution); and
- you may modify the materials by adapting, adding to or streamlining them;
- as long as you also distribute the materials under the same CC terms;
We have one additional provision—you must contact us (and all other previous authors) so that we can also benefit from (and perhaps distribute) your modified work.
One exception to this is that our video segments do not contain the “you may modify” provision – you must use our video segments in their entirety without modification. This is because our videos are primarily interviews, and are “whole-istic” — it would not be fair to make video “quotes” outside the context of the entire interview.
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