How to create a license - Step 1

Let's walk through creating a license and publishing it to your site.

Step 1 is where you tell us who you are and what you're going to license.

Right now, it's about licensing text content and image content. (We're working on video licenses right now). Text is a broad category that includes blogs, articles, poetry, long or short fiction, just about anything you can create with words. The image category includes photographs, art using traditional media like watercolors or oils, or new media like digital art, icons, trademark designs, just about anything you can visualize.

Here's what the Step 1 screen looks like:

If you click on the "Create new license" link in the toolbar, you will see the screen above.

Here's how to fill it out:

Locate your work. Open up another browser and go to your web site, or the online service where you show off your work. This can be your blog, a photo sharing site, any place on the Net where the world can find your stuff.

What's your site called? Make this descriptive, or a mix of title and description because this is what's going to show up our search results. Here's an example: Sea Light - a gallery of lighthouse photos by Alex Yarborough (a title, description, artist).

What do you have? The description is very important because this feeds our search engine, but don't worry if this is your first time through. You can always come back and update it later with more information.

What should the description look like? This can be descriptive prose, such as Here are my photos of my three-week trip to Athens. You can combine this with a series of tags--words separated by a comma that describe the works, such as, athens, athena, acropolis, greek, hellas, civilization.

You are the "rightsholder," which is a general term we use here to mean you're the artist, writer, the creator of the work, or you're acting on behalf of the creator of the work, for example, an agent, an executor for an estate. Simple as that.

Time to add some works. A couple things to keep in mind: your license will apply to everything in this list. If you're setting up a text license, you can add any number of articles, blog posts, research papers. For an image license, you can add photos, digital scans of paintings, icons.

(If you're photo-blogging, and you're licensing images, then you use the image content license even though your site is on TypePad or Blogger).

Click the "add new URL" link (In the image licensing workflow, it's called, "add new image URL").

The Add a work form looks like this:

Fill in the information about the individual image or article/post. The easiest way to get the URL for online text is to browse there and copy the URL from the address bar in your browser.

Add as many works as you want to the license. When you're done hit the Next button at the bottom.

Go to step 2