Creative Commons has officially launched a Web tool to aid content creators who want to publish material under the highly permissive CC0 license. The tool, which has been under development for over a year, has now reached 1.0 status and is accessible from the Creative Commons website.

Creative Commons was founded in 2001 by legal scholar and intellectual property reform advocate Lawrence Lessig to provide a legal framework for the free culture movement. Creative Commons offers a spectrum of copyright licenses that enable content creators to concede intellectual property rights to varying degrees in order to encourage third-party use of creative works. The organization has also developed technical tools that can be used to apply licensing metadata to digital content and to find material that is available under Creative Commons licenses.

In December 2007, Creative Commons launched its CC0 license—its most permissive—which effectively enabled content creators to waive all rights associated with a creative work. This is similar to dedicating a work to the public domain, but with stronger legal footing. The goal behind the CC0 initiative is to establish a vehicle for extending the concept of a public domain dedication into a form that will be recognized internationally as legally sound.

The CC0 Web tool provides a simple form that guides content creators through the process of distributing their work under a CC0 license. The form has several steps and includes the full text of the license for users to review. It also has information icons that can be clicked to get additional contextual explanations of various aspects of the license and form. Upon completion, the form will generate an XHTML blurb that can be embedded in a Web page to indicate the CC0 status of the work.

In addition to providing licenses, Creative Commons also provides simple "human-readable" summaries of the rights and obligations associated with each license. The CC0 overview is succinct and indicates that a work has been dedicated to the commons through a waiver of rights under copyright law.

Increasing the international applicability of Creative Commons licenses is one of the organization's major goals for this year. Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito described it as an important part of the roadmap in an open letter he wrote earlier this year during the organization's highly successful fundraiser. Ito believes that Creative Commons will supply a "basic layer of interoperability" for the propagation of content and ideas.

CCCritics

Not everyone is impressed with the CC0 initiative, however. License proliferation is a major concern that is often voiced by critics. In the open source software community, the growing number of conflicting and incompatible licenses has created numerous challenges for developers. Some fear that Creative Commons is paving the way for a similar problem in the free culture ecosystem.

Python expert and free software advocate Mark Pilgrim is among those who are skeptical about Creative Commons. In the past, he has been a vocal critic of the organization's non-commercial licenses and favors the GNU Free Documentation License for his own works. With his usual biting wit, Pilgrim joked about CC0 today in messages posted to identi.ca.

"Since I joined the Creative Commons license-of-the-month club, I've acquired new vim and vigor!" he sarcastically remarked. "Seriously, stop making new licenses. I know your needs are extra-special and super-unique and nobody understands you but JUST FUCKING STOP."

I can sympathize with his view to a certain degree, but it's worth pointing out that the criticism might not entirely be deserved in this case. The compatibility problems that are generally cited as the most undesirable effect of licensing proliferation aren't relevant here because CC0 is so permissive that it is compatible with everything.

CC0 serves specific functions that aren't addressed by other permissive licenses (such as the BSD license) by entirely eliminating the need to preserve copyright information or markings. The only apparent downside of CC0 is that it generates some confusion about when it should be used and when public domain dedication should be used instead. According to the official CC0 FAQ, public domain dedication is still relevant for certifying that a work created by a third-party is in the public domain.

For more details about the license and how it works, check out the overview from Plagiarism Today. The full text of the CC0 license is available from the Creative Commons website.

Further reading

Found via Slashdot

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