Yahoo Offers Creative Commons Search Engine
Yahoo has released a search service for searching the Creative Commons database of content which is available for reuse and redistribution. Most material on the Internet comes with a full copyright, Yahoo Creative Commons search helps developers and site owners find content published by authors that want sites to share or reuse it, under certain conditions. The new search service was announced on the Yahoo Search Blog today, with a special guest post by Creative Commons creator Larry Lessig.
Larry also praised the new Yahoo CC search on his own blog:
Late last night, Yahoo! launched a Creative Commons search engine, permitting you to search the web, filtering results on the basis of Creative Commons licenses. So, as I feel like I’ve said 10,000 times when explaining CC on the road, “Show me pictures of the Empire State Building that I can use for noncommercial use,” and this is the first of about 13,000 on the list.
This is exciting news for us. It confirms great news about Yahoo!. I met their senior management last October. They had, imho, precisely the right vision of a future net. Not a platform for delivering whatever, but instead a platform for communities to develop. With the acquisition of Flickr, the step into blogging and now this tool to locate the welcome mats spread across the net, that vision begins to turn real.
One nice addition is the check boxes for selecting to search content available for commercial reproduction or content which can be modified upon.
More from Yahoo:
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.
This “all rights reserved” protection is good thing for many authors and artists. But what about those who want you to use their work freely without permission — but on 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.” If you respect the rights they have reserved (which will be clearly marked, as you’ll see) then you can use the work without having to contact them and ask. In some cases, you may even find work in the public domain — that is, free for any use with “no rights reserved.”
