Creative Commons Licenses: Artistic Copyright Licences For Creative Works

[mandy]

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that offers a flexible copyright for creative work.

...including Audio (music, sounds, speeches), Video (movies, animations, footage), Images (photos, illustrations, designs), Text (books, blogs, essays), Education (lesson plans, course packets, textbooks), and Software

Creative Commons helps you publish your work online while letting others know exactly what they can and can't do with your work. When you choose a license, we provide you with tools and tutorials that let you add license information to our own site, or to one of several free hosting services that have incorporated Creative Commons.

A FAQ/Cheat Sheet explaining Creative Commons Licenses: http://management.silicon.com/government...155,00.htm

The 6 main types of types of Creative Commons Licenses available:
http://creativecommons.org/about/license...e-licenses

The Music Sharing License for Musicians:
http://creativecommons.org/license/music

The Sampling License for Musicians, Artists, and Authors:
http://creativecommons.org/about/sampling

More info, publish your works:
http://creativecommons.org/

[Kristijntje]

A related article:

Creative Commons License Upheld by Dutch Court

The significant piece is this: the Creative Commons licenses are quite new, so there has been very little in the way of case law so far, so this is a significant development, as you will see. You can read successful plaintiff Adam Curry's blog on the ruling too. He adds this important piece: that while his claim for damages for past use was denied, going forward, if the pictures are used again, the defendant "will be fined 1000 euros (about $1200) for each photo they use without permission."

The ruling rejected a "the license wasn't clear" defense, particularly for sophisticated entities, and it upheld the license as binding without the licensee having to agree or even to have knowledge of the terms of the license...

The Dutch Court’s decision is especially noteworthy because it confirms that the conditions of a Creative Commons license automatically apply to the content licensed under it, and bind users of such content even without expressly agreeing to, or having knowledge of, the conditions of the license.

full article: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story...6052623594

[mandy]

A related article:

Are you a crafter of icons, sounds, backgrounds and splash screens, or even window manager themes? Selecting the right license for your artwork to coexist with free software is no trivial task. Creative Commons (CC) and Free Software Foundation (FSF) licenses each have their advantages, but they are mutually incompatible. The two groups are beginning to move toward simplifying the situation, but in the meantime there are several things you can do to make license compatibility easier.

The crux of the problem is that non-software artwork like the examples above occupies a strange niche inside free software applications and operating systems. They are not code, but they are tightly integrated into the system. Artists frequently create them as standalone works, but they are also -- by necessity -- bundled into software packages and distributions, many of which are under the FSF's General Public License (GPL).
A Creative Commons taxonomy

CC has crafted a palette of licenses for non-software works that is naturally appealing to artists. Other artists use them, they are integrated into the tools of social networking sites like Flickr, and they explicitly accommodate the concerns of artists by using the appropriate terminology -- "performance," "reproduce," and "adaptation," ...

full article: http://www.linux.com/feature/119212