Copyright restricts use of material created by an author or publisher.
Creative commons on the other hand, was set up to allow the original creator to restrict only some rights and thereby allow users to use his material. It was not created as a replacement for copyright but as an addition to it.
Creative commons licensing lets authors easily mark their work with the freedom they want it to carry.
It allows authors to move from “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved”
You can read up here:
www.creativecommons.org

These are graded in 1 to 6 ways and here are the first 4:
The related images are at the bottom of this page.

Attribution license

The most flexible is attribution
You can use the material as long as you give an attribution to the original author
You can distribute it, change it, build upon it and even use it commercially
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Attribution share alike

Attribution with no distribution
Here you can change it, build up it and even use it commercially
But you cannot distribute it

Attribution no derivatives

Attribution as long as you do not change it
You can redistribute it for commercial and non commercial use but you must not change it in any way.

Attribution non commercial

Attribution for non commercial use
You can add to it, change it and use it non commercially.
You CANNOT use it commercially.

When using images on your website under these various licenses, just make sure you or your web person, adds a title and alt tag to the image with an attribution to the author or creator. You know this is so when you rollover the image and a little box opens showing this info. This is the alt tag in your web site code.
You should also add one of the icons that creative commons offer and I have attached some of these at the end of this document.

Where to find images with these licenses?
One resource is flickr .com. Search under creative commons
All the images in the creative commons section give you various degrees of freedom of use.

How to attribute an image you use, to the author
Go here and search on how to attribute
http://search.creativecommons.org/
This post shows you exactly how to attribute the image you decide to show on your site.

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