A Creative Commons license allows authors / creators of writings, art and music to place conditions on the use of copyright works by others. The license amends your Copyright with the permission for others to use your work in certain ways. They can choose restrictions they wish to assign to their works, all of this free of charge. The intention is to avoid the problems created by current copyright laws.

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization launched in 2001 by lawyers, intellectual property experts and web publishers. The Creative Commons website allows holders of copyright to clearly mark their work with icons that mark the work with Some Rights Reserved or No Rights Reserved. Creative works are set free for certain uses.

Creative Commons has a variety of licenses that allow copyright holders the ability to grant some or all rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes. They supply digital documents in both plain English and legal wording. Digital codes are supplied to embed in websites according to the type of license.

Licenses are in 6 major types of licenses plus a public domain dedication. They vary between allowing commercial and non commercial sharing as well as rights to change and remix the work.

Currently Google, Yahoo have Creative Commons search for content on the web which is reusable or modifiable. You can search for photos, music, text, books, educational material, and more. Yahoo now offers a Creative Commons Search API which can be worked into web applications.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 4:47 am and is filed under Blog Marketing, Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.