The work on this site is published under a Creative Commons licence, which says that the work is free for anyone to use, as long as they give proper attribution, don’t charge for it, and, if they republish it, do so under the same license. Creative Commons is the creation of Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig, who was motivated by the desire to find something less restrictive, and less damaging to the creative exchange of ideas, than standard copyright, but which still reserved to the author of a work some say about how that work got used.
There are a number of different Creative Commons licenses; you can go to their website and select just what set of restrictions you want to place on works that you create, and the website then generates a license for you, complete with a graphic image that links to a human readable version of the license; that in turn links to a full legal version of the license that should get by even the most nit-picky lawyers.
This video tells you a little more about the CC concept:
And the best thing about the video is that every time you watch it, or get someone else to watch it, you help support the Creative Commons Foundation. The Foundation has formed a partnership with Revver, a new viral video network that generates revenue by tacking a short, very unobtrusive ad onto the tail end of every video placed on their site. They share the revenue generated by the advertising 50-50 with the video’s creator. Until the end of the year, they are giving 100% of the revenue generated by the several Creative Commons videos on their site to the CC Foundation.
So please, click away. And then go watch some of the other CC videos; they are interesting and entertaining, and each time you play one through, you’re doing a little bit to help a very good and innovative enterprise.
And if you want to do more, I urge you to support the Commons by buying CC-branded merchandise or donating to their fund-raising campaign.
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