If Creative Commons (CC) has any say in the matter, the Web will soon have a standard machine-readable notation for licenses. Named the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL), the notation has been under development for the last few years, partly with the cooperation of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3).

Creative Commons organisation has launched a new version of its online tool for helping users choose a licence for their works. They also published second draft of version 4.0 of its suite of Creative Commons licences.

Everything I publish here is covered under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. Basically this means anyone is free to use it, share it, or adapt it as they like, as long as they credit me for the original work and don’t use it commercially. I bring this up because I had a plagiarism issue arise recently.

"Recently, the Wikimedia Foundation proposed that the copyright licensing terms on its wikis be changed to include a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license in addition to its longstanding GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The proposal was approved by a 75 percent majority of community voters as announced this week..."

"Ars Technica are reporting that Trent Reznor has released his latest NIN (Nine Inch Nails) album under a Creative Commons license. He has released Ghost I-IV under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license..." -- http://ghosts.nin.com/main/faq -- via dogmazic: http://blog.dogmazic.net/2008/03/nin-publie-ghosts-i-iv-en-cc-by-nc-sa

US Nature magazine, which mainly targets scientists but also reaches a wider audience due to its easily understandable reporting, will release articles dealing with genome research under a type of Creative Commons license.

I am personally a big proponent behind the idea of the Creative Commons movement, which tries to create a free-er multimedia society where listeners, users and remixers build upon original works and freely exchange that information.

This week a friend posted on her blog that she was marking all of her Flickr images “all rights reserved” (instead of with a Creative Commons license) and “friends and family only” (instead of publicly viewable) because of this story.

Creative Commons is becoming a web force to be reckoned with. I recently switched to a Firefox browser from Internet Explorer (a revelation in many ways, but that’s another article) and didn’t even have to modify my toolbar to create a Creative Commons search shortcut.