Creative Commons
The Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to legally build upon and share.| Table of contents |
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2 History 3 Localization 4 See also 5 Projects using Creative Commons licenses 6 External links |
Aim
Their website allows copyright holders to grant some of their rights to the public while retaining others, through a variety of licensing and contract schemes, which may include dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems which current copyright laws create for the sharing of information.
The project provides several free licenses that copyright holders can use when they release their works on the web. They also provide RDF/XML metadata that describes the license and the work to make it easier to automatically process and locate of licensed works. They also provide a 'Founder's Copyright' [1] contract, intended to re-create the effects of the original U.S. Copyright created by the founders of the U.S. Constitution.
Lawrence Lessig is the founder and chairman of Creative Commons and started the organization as an additional method of achieving the goals of his Supreme Court case, Eldred v. Ashcroft.
History
Creative commons was officially launched in 2001.Localization
Among the Creative Commons projects, the iCommons (International Commons) intends to fine tune the Creative Commons legal wording to the specifics of individual countries. This is because the main Creative Comments licenses are written with the US legal model in mind, thus the wording may not be perfect for other countries. As of November 26, 2003, Brazil, Finland Japan and Taiwan have joined this initiative [1]. See also
Projects using Creative Commons licenses
External links
