URL: http://creativecommons.org/
Date created: 2001
Description:
Creative Commons has developed a Web application that helps people dedicate their creative works to the public domain or retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions. Creative Commons are designed for a variety of creative works: websites, scholarship, music, film, photography, literature, courseware, etc. To this end, they have developed metadata that can be used to associate creative works with their public domain or license status in a machine-readable way. These metadata enable applications to find, for example, photographs that are free to use provided that the original photographer is credited, or songs that may be copied, distributed, or sampled with no restrictions whatsoever. They provide an RDF Schema (http://creativecommons.org/technology/metadata/implement) with two major parts: a work description, and a license description. The work description uses Dublin Core properties to provide information about the work. Finally they provide online tools to generates the metadata describing your resources (http://creativecommons.org/license/)
Usecase:
"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.' "
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