Creative Commons offers a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors and artists. They have built upon the “all rights reserved” of traditional copyright to create a voluntary “some rights reserved” copyright. They are nonprofit and all tools are free.

Copyright applies fully and automatically to any work – a photograph, a song, a web page, an article, pretty much any form of expression – the moment it is created. This means that if you want to copy and re-use a creative work you find online, you usually have to ask the author’s permission.

Recently Yahoo Search offered the new Yahoo Creative Commons Search Beta.

This Yahoo! Search service finds content across the Web that has a Creative Commons license.
It will help you find content on the Web – text, books, educational material, etc. – that is free to share or build upon.

While most stuff you find on the web has a full copyright, this search helps you find content published by authors that want you to share or reuse it, under certain conditions.

This search engine helps you quickly find those authors and the work they have marked as free to use with only “some rights reserved.”

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