Creative Commons News & Articles

In the last year or so, Vimeo, the video sharing site, has reached 50 million users worldwide up from 30 million a year ago. In fact, it’s fairly common to have video links across social networks redirect to Vimeo. Its growing popularity has lead Vimeo to undergo a website design that provides registered users with a better Vimeo experience.

Licensing content can be a headache, especially for authors and developers who wish to use other persons' or groups' work in their own. While photo-sharing sites have long since advocated the use of Creative Commons licenses, the concept is gaining ground in videos, and YouTube (news, site) is set to announce the integration of Creative Commons in videos and the cloud-based YouTube video editor.

Because many textbooks are becoming available for download online, there’s very little need to own the expensive, behemoth, hardbound textbooks anymore — subsequently, reducing the need to schlep them around.

A company called Connexions takes this approach many steps farther by not only publishing free textbooks, but also by allowing students and teachers to rewrite and edit material “as long as the originator is credited.”

The idea of “open sourcing” a company’s intellectual property has traditionally been applied to the source code that makes up a particular application. Yet in a surprising move, Knowledge Tree - which already offers its document management system under an open source license - is releasing all of its documentation, developer guides, and marketing materials under a Creative Commons contribution license.

When a large corporate body and a suburban teen can use the same platform to air a great idea or persuasive stream of thought, what protects one or the other from negligence of source citation or outright content theft? It’s harder to track information back to its origins when the origin itself can be added, edited, published and deleted on a whim.

Noting that the corporate machine might be slightly better able than the teen at navigating the complex world of content rights, Creative Commons came up with a solution as simple and fluid as the flow of information it is often meant to protect. And recently, the 3.0 version of said solution has been unwrapped.