CreativeCommons huh?

With the ever growing mass of user generated content on the web, the question of rights of the material and its usage, sharing, modification, etc have come into question. If you upload an image to FLICKR can it be used by magazine for profit? Can your contribution to Wikitravel or material from your blog be used? And how do you disallow the use of the material for commercial purposes while allowing general usage on the web (sharing, reference, etc) for non-commercial purposes? The recent Adam Curry vs. Weekend case has brought the Creative Commons license to limelight and has upheld the license which has been a huge boost to online contributors such as myself.

So what is Creative Commons again?
From Wikipedia:

"The Creative Commons website enables copyright holders to grant some of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes including dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information.

The project provides several free licenses that copyright holders can use when releasing their works on the web. They also provide RDF/XML metadata that describes the license and the work that makes it easier to automatically process and locate licensed works. They also provide a "Founders' Copyright" [1] contract, intended to re-create the effects of the original U.S. Copyright created by the founders of the U.S. Constitution.

All these efforts, and more, are done to counter the effects of the dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture pervading modern society; a culture pressed hard upon society by traditional content distributors in order to maintain and strengthen their monopolies on cultural products such as popular music and popular cinema."

In the Curry vs Weekend case, Adam Curry (a well known MTV presenter) had published pictures of his family on FLICKR under Creative Commons. A Dutch tabloid, Weekend published these pictures in their magazine. Curry challenged this in court and won a ruling in his favour upholding the Creative Commons license.

Yesterday I released the above images (shot by me) to Wikitravel (See my contributions to Dubai & South Bombay) under the CC-by-SA license, feeling safe that they will contribute to user created content and can be shared liberally under a contempory license which uploads the GNU ideals.

Widely generated, mass contributed, copyright free ideas, creatives, techniques are in the ultimate self interest of mankind. They leverage the collective mind and promote efficient, high quality, low defect material. Go on become a contributor.