Creative Commons There is now an enormous amount of excellent reference material available on the Internet -- I think it is a shame that so much of it is not freely available due to copyright concerns. I am an advocate for as much free use of online material as possible. I believe that Creative Commons licensing is an excellent means to that end. Of course there are numerous Copyright owners (including institutions, corporations and business owners) who wish to fully protect their material because it is a source of income for them -- Creative Commons licensing is usually not for them. The whole idea behind Creative Commons is to allow free use and sharing of online material without the encumbrance of having to seek author permission -- which is often a long, time consuming, procedure -- and at the same time insuring that author intellectual property ownership is recognized and protected. I use this Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License on my web pages. It permits visitors to freely copy and use content with attribution to me. Please read about the licenses - and see them in action - by following the links on this Creative Commons Page Just food for thought.
Example of Creative Commons License use in real life This review (and translation into Swedish) of one of my web pages by P. Strand via the above link illustrates the use of Creative Commons License attribution. If you follow the License link you will see that it permits free sharing, copying and distribution of page content with appropriate attribution. BTW, all of my pages are covered by that license -- it is just that I am too old, sick and lazy to re-install the license notice. But I will get around to it (a round tew it) one of these days -- but they are covered. Follow the links on this Creative Commons Page
I have now installed the license notice on my Portal page. I will gradually install it on all of my web pages. James
What this is all about. First of all the usual disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and therefor those interested in this subject should use online search engines to seek detailed authoritative information. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is an agency of the United Nations. Just about all of the member states are signatories and enforce compliance. It all boils down to this: All information posted online, textual or images -- whether accompanied by a copyright notice or not -- is the exclusive intellectual property of the originator (owner) and remains so until the copyright expires by statute (variable); the owner consigns it to the public domain or he/she sells or otherwise transfers ownership to some other person or entity. The copyright owner can also license usage under various conditions -- as we all do here to the board owner in accordance with the Forum terms of usage -- while still retaining copyright ownership. A problem occurs when an individual would like to use Copyrighted material under a license from the copyright owner (and avoid copyright infringement penalties) -- that procedure often presents great difficulties involving a great deal of searching and correspondence to obtain the requisite permission. Creative Commons licensing solves that problem -- and it is free!
