Actually I’ve written this article long time ago with the title Licensing Your Works
But seems like there are still some people do not really understand what is Creative Commons yet, so I will try to write again with more detail information, and I am going to make it as easy to understand as possible.
Some of the contents in this article will be quote from the Creative Commons website, as I think it would be the best to avoid delivering wrong information.
So, what is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons is something like Copyright ©.
The difference is, things that is copyrighted with “Copyright ©” does not allow you to copy the contents and republish it else where.
If lets say you are running a website or a blog, or even make your photo albums available to the public on the Internet. You allow other people to share them all over the Internet, but you wanted to reserve your rights on these contents which people are sharing them all over the Internet. Then Creative Commons is something you need, instead of “Copyright ©”.
From the picture at above, you can see there are several icons. These are the icons of several rights you wanted impose on your works.