MELISSALAND

I thought this was a pretty great letter from musician Jonathan Coulton explaining the benefits of Creative Commons:

“When you’re an artist, it’s a wonderful thing to hear from a fan who likes what you do. But it’s even more thrilling to see that someone was moved enough to make something brand new based on it - that your creative work has inspired someone to do more creative work, that your little song had a child and that child was a YouTube video that a million people watched. A Creative Commons license is like a joy multiplier. The art you create adds to the world whenever someone appreciates it, but you also get karma credit for every new piece of art it inspires. And around and around. This is my favorite thing about Creative Commons: the act of creation becomes not the end, but the beginning of a creative process that links complete strangers together in collaboration. To me it’s a deeply satisfying and beautiful vision of what art and culture can be.”  — Jonathan Coulton (read Jonathan’s full letter here)

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that works to increase the amount of content (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in “the commons” — the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, re-purposing, and remixing. Creative Commons does this by providing free, easy-to-use legal and technical tools that give everyone a simple, standardized way to pre-clear copyrights to their creative work. CC licenses let people easily change their copyright terms from the default, restrictive “all rights reserved” to a more flexible “some rights reserved.” To learn more about Creative Commons, please visit their website.