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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 [2].
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.
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 [4], an advocacy group working on these issues.
For more about alternative licenses, visit the CreativeCommons.org [5] website.