Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a legal initiative started by Lawrence Lessig to give creators alternatives to the standard copyrighting system. The old system -- using the familiar © symbol -- denotes "all rights reserved," whereas CC allows authors to post a "some rights reserved" tag on their work.

Some choose to allow their creation for commercial use, and some don't. Some allow sharing and transforming, and some don't. Some require that changes must be made available under a similar CC license, ensuring that progress continues.

There are also independent divisions of CC with other missions, like Science Commons, which supports scientific progress without legal road blocks, and ccLearn, which promotes the use of open educational resources (OER) at schools and universities.

Jeff Grabill uses Creative Commons in the MSU WIDE program on a regular basis. “We do a lot of stuff with Creative Commons. Most of the stuff that we publish as a research center, we put under a Creative Commons license of some kind. And we make software here, and the licensing that we choose for that software is different flavors of Creative Commons licensing.”

(Source: http://creativecommons.org)

"Wanna Work Together?" - this video explains what Creative Commons is all about.

 Still confused? Here's an older video called "Get Creative." (both videos courtesy http://creativecommons.org/, under a Creative Commons license).