The licences should be published in the next few days and will
be followed by a version for Scotland in a few weeks.
Founded in 2001, Creative Commons is a non-profit
US
corporation based on the notion that some people
may not want to exercise all of the intellectual property rights
the law affords them.
Its aim is to encourage creativity and innovation by paving a
middle ground between "All rights reserved" and anarchy. It
describes this as "Some rights reserved".
Inspired partly by the GNU General Public License developed by
the Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons has drafted licences
that give the public some rights to use and manipulate the work of
authors and artists, while allowing the authors to retain some
rights, such as those permitting commercial exploitation.
While the original model is
US
-based, international
licences are being developed that comply with the laws of the
specific countries involved. International licences are already in
operation in 14 countries worldwide, including Japan, Finland,
Germany, Brazil and the Netherlands, while the process for
developing the licence is underway in 10 more countries, including
the
UK
.
The
UK
process is almost complete, and on Wednesday
the group held a launch party for the England and Wales versions of
the licence. They should be available on the web site shortly.
