Creative Commons License Chooser

A few years ago I published a Google Docs Add-on that allowed users to insert a Creative Commons license image and link into their Google doc. Since then it’s been used thousands of times and I’ve gotten some great feedback from teachers about how nice it is to teach their students about digital literacy.

Why

I created the app after inspiration from students in one of the classes I teach at Fresno Pacific University’s Graduate School of Education. The javascript and html wasn’t too hard to pickup, and I was able to use a template of the codebase for the chooser from the Creative Commons webpage anyway. I admit I had to pay a guy on Upwork to help clean up the code before I published it because sometimes the chooser would keep selecting hundreds of license images… of course, this was also before I was a bona fide contributor to the open source project I Product Manage, OpenSALT.

My hope is that folks are able to normalize the idea of putting a Creative Commons license on their public documents, as well as when uploading creative content to Youtube etc. Teachers in particular would be served by publishing a license so that if their work shows up unauthorized on Teachers Pay Teachers without attribution or for commercial purposes, they have a legal avenue to pursue it to be taken down. Even Medium has an option to publish documents with…