Creative Commons and my legal use license of authored online works

A free acceptable use license that I am using — Thanks Lawrence Lessig!

I was surfing wired.com tonight and made a great discovery– let’s see if I can trace my virtual footprints here… I was reading the article “ITunes Music Swap Just Won’t Die” and found a link to boingboing.net (which I had never heard of.) The site has a lot of user posted discussion. What caught my eye was a post by Lawrence Lessig, author of a book I have almost finished and highly recommend (The Future of Ideas.) The post included a link to Lessig’s blog , where I read his latest opinion about the California recall election (posted 2 days ago). I also was drawn to the footer on his blog pages to Creative Commons , an organization he started. Now with that history explained, here is what I found….

Creative Commons allows anyone to create a free usage license for works they author. For me right now, this includes a variety of articles posted on my Tools for the TEKS website. Up till now, I have been posting the copyright symbol on the footer of every page, with a statement that these materials could be used for educational/nonprofit purposes but that I would appreciate an email letting me know the materials are being used. Not anymore after tonight, now I have a link to the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0 license . Very cool.

The Creative Commons site also has what is most likely the best Flash animation example I have seen to date . Very cool, and very effective communication method.

And now this history is recorded for all posterity and interested netizens on my blog, isn’t technology amazing…… 🙂