Thoughts on Creative Commons licenses

Today I have been working on the presentation for my dissertation talk today at university. I want to release this under a creative commons license so others may learn from my work. This then reminded me that ‘hey I am at university, they own everything I do’. This may sound a bit strange, but if you are at university check as I am sure you will have something similar!

Anyway, back to creative commons, I did a bit of searching originally as I wasn’t sure about licensing issues as I had used other peoples work in my presentation: company logos, a couple of random images from a Google Image search, and LOLCats. Although I have noted this in my presentation, I was unsure on how releasing this under a creative commons license would effect this. The company logos I think are ok, as this would be defined as fair use. The LOLCats site T&C clearly says not reuse is allowed, but seeing how plenty of other people reuse them I think that can be safely ignored. The Google Image searches are a bit trickier though.

The main post I came across was Creative Commons license for presentations? This has a good discussion about creative commons licenses, and the issue of other work.

This made me wonder though. The code I posted a couple of weeks ago is licensed under a BY-NC-SA license. But this license applies differently to different types of work. In this case I want people to be able to use this tool to create other commercial pieces of work (i.e. putting in HTML and getting out Javascript), I want them to be able to download a copy and save it on their computer, even share it with their colleages if they may wish. But I don’t want them to make a commercial project out it it. On the other hand if you have an image you don’t want to anyone to use it commercially (in whatever way), but you want them to be able to share it with friends. Am I missing something or what?