The Creative Commons licenses went public today. I’ve been looking forward to this. Essentially, they’ve created a boilerplate method of licensing your creative works into the commons. You retain copyright, and you choose from a menu of possible restrictions on the use of your work, and they provide you with an appropriate and reliable legal document. It makes giving away your creative efforts easy.
Not only does this tickle my interest in donating intellectual effort to the world, it satisfies one of my instincts. It minimizes the effort needed to take a particular action, which in my book is the best way to get people to take that action. You’ve got to cut down on friction if you want people to do things. Creative Commons makes the licensing process gut simple.
I expect to be licensing Population: One under one of their licenses soon, once I’ve mulled it over a little.
One Comment
Hrm. Very cool, though I’m not surprised they failed to accomodate my terms of choice – attribution in the case of commercial use, unrestricted otherwise. I could in principle enforce that myself by going with the non-commercial license and granting permission to anyone who agrees to attribution. So that’s, all in all, very cool.