Sharing Nicely

Also found this on the lessig blog. A US publisher makes the majority of its newspapers available online under CC Attribution NonCommercial license. This is important, because it greatly lowers the effort involved in clearing rights. Many people have nothing against others using their content for non-commercial use, but they would like to be asked. While this seems reasonable, over time it gets more and more difficult to identify and contact the rights holder – leaving a large part of content in licensing limbo. The owner has nothing against others using it, but these others can’t find a way to get formal authorisation and without authorisation they would risk breaking copyright law. CC licenses make all of that much easier.

From the original article:

“I don’t know of any other newspaper or any MSM site for that matter, publishing under CC,” said Howard Owens, director of digital publishing for Gatehouse, in a comment on the TAB’s blog. “It’s really not a big change from how a lot of newspaper sites handle content — free non-commercial use, but generally only if you ask. This removes the middle man of asking, because now it’s explicitly stated that free non-commercial use is permitted.”

Full article is here: http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2006/12/15/newspaper_chain.html