Creative Commons
This looks like a neat and useful function. On the Creative Commons website,http://creativecommons.org/, there is a useful search capability for finding sites with this licensing and it seems to point to Wikimedia Commons in the search results. The seach capability is the good news and the slightly bad news is that there is not a large number of search hits on a topic. I tried searching for ‘Common Loon Call” to see if I could find an audio file and the search did find one in Wikimedia Commons which was helpful by in that it was downloadable. However, it was not of a particularly good quality. Through Google search I found really good loon calls on CornellUniversity’s site but those are heavily copyrighted.
I guess that the use of Creative Commons is expanding and may not be widely known yet. Also the narrative for Creative Commons talks of its use by “artists” as opposed to general use and I am not sure why it appears to be targeting that audience and that is confusing. Creative Commons is a great concept and is trying to provide the most flexibility for internet site creators while providing them protection and ownership for their creative works. If anything, it provides too much flexibility which forces work owners to have to make decisions that they may have to wrestle with which might delay their use.
Creative Commons is very much in the spirit of the internet mentality and I hope that its use expands as it becomes more widely known. I do plan to use it for sites I build.