The Creative Commons Updated and Upgraded Its Online Search Functions

The Creative Commons website updated its search engine for people who are looking for public domain content. It sees almost 60,000 searches each month so Creative Commons made the search engine faster, make searching easier with better filters and the nonprofit organization also redesigned the search page to be more user-friendly.

In the beta version, there were 9.5 million images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, Rijksmuseum and Flicker available. Today, there are over 300 million images available with the additional collections from the Cleveland Museum of Art and others added to the index. The nonprofit group also has free texts and music available with more content types in the works. The ultimate goal is to have all the estimated 1.4 billion works in the public domain and with Creative Common licenses available.

Content can have one of several types of CC license, some more restrictive than others. Owners of the copyright can decide if people can share the material, use the work commercially and if they can alter it. In all cases, attribution is required. Public domain content does not require attribution to use. Fortunately, the license's language is in everyday language so everyone can understand them.

While it is very easy to copy and paste images found online, in most cases, it is illegal to use them. Many people use whatever image they like from a Google image search and never get caught, but the creator could legally ask for monetary compensation.

There are plenty of other resources online for finding CC and public domain images, including Wikimedia Commons and Openclipart. If you are looking for audio content, try ccMixter, Incompetech and Freesound. Individuals looking for video content can find public domain and CC content on the Vimeo Public Domain Channel and on Videvo. For more information click here https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/30/creative-commons-launches-its-search-engine-out-of-beta-with-over-300m-images-indexed/.