Creative Commons Launches

from the it's-about-time dept

It's finally happened. It seems that almost a year after the plans were announced, Larry Lessig's Creative Commons is finally launching. It seems to follow what they said it would, allowing anyone who creates anything to pick one of a number of different licenses for their work, to allow less restrictive controls than the standard copyright. Anyone who uses the Creative Commons licensing system gets a document with the legal language, a plain language explanation, and some metadata to put on a website. The idea behind the metadata, of course, is that a search engine will be able to identify and find specific instances of Creative Commons-enabled works of art. Need to find a song that can be used for non-commercial reasons? Then just do a search on it. Anyway, when the plans were first detailed at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference people thought it was cool, but there seemed to be a lot of skepticism over how well it would work. Now we'll see if people really think it's worth going through the effort. I'm still wondering how they deal with people who claim to own the rights to something when they really don't.

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