Creative Commons..

If you have an eye for detail, you might have observed a new button that has appeared at the bottom of the sidebar of this blog. It says 'Some Rights Reserved' and has been lying there at the bottom for a few days now. This button links to a partial copyright license that I've got from Creative Commons.

Creative Commons is a nonprofit, offering a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors and artists, to build a layer of reasonable copyright. They have built upon the "all rights reserved" of traditional copyright to create a voluntary "some rights reserved" copyright.

Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which "all rights reserved" (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species.

Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare "some rights reserved."

Thus, a single goal unites Creative Commons' current and future projects: to build a layer of reasonable, flexible copyright in the face of increasingly restrictive default rules.

[from Creative Commons]

Till about a week or two back they had indexed all the webpages that have linked to a license from them, and believed it to be around 5 million. But after it's birthday party, Yahoo did the same and found to everyone's amusement that the number is nearly 10 million! I think everyone should get a license from them. It makes absolute sense. Perfectly absolute sense.

~ Ankur.