The University of Texas maintains a useful “Copyright Crash Course” through its library website. It’s a great resource, providing a clearinghouse of information on many topics such as ownership and management of copyrights, open access materials, fair use and orphan works, and copyright issues within libraries and universities. Of course, the site lays out the ways Creative Commons can help us build on others’ creative expression (and is itself licensed BY-NC-SA). A note from the authors on the ease of CC:

“I only had to copy and paste a snippet of code I got from the Creative Commons Website into this document to make the license appear. The snippet does three things: it creates this cool little image, it links the reader directly to the Creative Commons site for more details about my license and it makes this document searchable by the Creative Commons search engines so that people who are looking for materials they can be sure they are free to use can easily find it. Very powerful stuff.”