[TIPS] - Creative Commons Copyright

I forgot to set up a tip for yesterday when I was out at the High School Computer Fair. Congratulations to Stephanie B from West Shore for winning Second Place in the Digital Movie Category!

Here's yesterday's tip:
Copyright issues are always on the minds (or SHOULD be, perhaps) of our teachers and students. The definition of Fair Use is confusing and still very limiting, at times. But, there is another type of copyright that is becoming more widely used. It's the Creative Commons License.

- - snip from wikipedia - -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons

The Creative Commons website enables copyright holders to grant some of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes including dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information.

The project provides several free licenses that copyright holders can use when releasing their works on the web. They also provide RDF/XML metadata that describes the license and the work that makes it easier to automatically process and locate licensed works. They also provide a "Founders' Copyright" [1] contract, intended to re-create the effects of the original U.S. Copyright created by the founders of the U.S. Constitution.
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Watch for this to become more and more common as "the long tail" of users/authors/designers/etc push to make information more accessible and usable.