Creative Commons
The Creative Commons, officially launched in 2001, is a not-for-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share. 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.
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. 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 contract, intended to re-create the effects of the originial U.S. Copyright created by the founders of the U.S. Constitution.
Among the Creative Commons projects, the iCommons (International Commons) intends to bring the Creative Commons model to other countries. As of October 14, 2003, Japan, Finland and Brazil have joined this initiative [1].
See also: