We make all original CIMA content available for others to build on and distribute through a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike License. Based on the model of open-source software, this license means that anyone is welcome to redistribute or use parts or all of our content in noncommercial forms, provided they include a credit to CIMA for the original work and that they make any resulting work available with the same license.
For more information about the CC-a-nc-sa License, click here.
However, please note that not all of the content on this website is original to CIMA and available in this way. If you are interested in using or redistributing something you find on this website, please check the authorship and any included copyright information. Of course, any article, book, report or other content from another site that is featured as a link on MediaActionCenter.org will have its own copy restrictions - please follow the link to the source to determine how you can use the content.
A special exception is the content posted in the Copyleft Gallery. The purpose of this gallery is to allow activists to post and find materials they can reuse in their work. You can use all or part of any text or images you find here for noncommercial purposes, provided that you make the resulting work available in the same way. So, you can download a media-octopus graphic from the Gallery and make a flyer with it, but then you need to put your flyer up in the Gallery (or just add a link to it) so that others can use it in the same way. If you have photos, graphics, slogans, posters or other cool materials that media activists can use, please post them in the Copyleft Gallery! (Of course, do not post any copyrighted photos or other content that doesn't belong to you.)
Copyright is a form of creative incentive that was originally designed to enable creators to control (and profit from) their work for a limited time and then to allow the work to pass into the public domain for other artists, scientists, scholars and creators to build on it. But due to corporate (especially Hollywood) pressure, the copyright laws in the U.S. have been so extended that most contemporary culture, science and art is kept out of the public domain and creators have few options for sharing their work into the creative community or making it available on their own terms.
The Creative Commons licenses were created as a better alternative for the digital age. For current battles over copyright law, policy and culture, check out PublicKnowledge.org, an advocacy group working on these issues.
For more about alternative licenses, visit the CreativeCommons.org website.
