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It’s hard to believe, but the Creative Commons project is 6 today. The project grew out of the battles over copyright and just after the licenses were released I wrote about it and all the content on this site has been under a Creative Commons license since then. That’s over 350 posts that anyone is freely able to share as long as they give me credit and don’t use it for commercial purpose. The genius of the CC project is that it appeals to our generosity in making it easier to share and find things that we can legally use to create new works. One of the things that initially made me excited about sharing photos on Flickr was the ease at adding CC licensing to your uploads very easily. Now I’m sharing 7,333 photos that are all under an Attribution-Noncommercial license, so if you want to use any photo you can if you give me credit and don’t sell it. There are almost 13 million photos on Flickr with the same licence and millions more under other CC licenses.
To put my money where my mouth is, I’ve also joined the Creative Commons network which gives me an OpenID and a page that lets people know about the works that I’ve licensed (as well as a t-shirt, a sticker, and a cool USB stick with songs by Jonathan Coulton on it). If you create work I would encourage you to think about licensing it and if you look at photos, or video, read things online, or listen to music or audio, you can search and find almost anything that you legally share, remix and reuse. It’s a wonderful new world thanks to the Creative Commons project and I’m proud and happy to be part of it.
