I’ve been a fan of the Creative Commons for a while now, and have even published some creative commons content over the past few years. It looks the like the license is picking up steam these days, what with the Yahoo Creative Commons Search as well as all of the press that it has been getting.

For those of you uninitiated Creative Commons is a non profit organization that offers a variety of licenses with “some rights reserved”. Basically is is built to allow artists to legally share their work without losing copyright protection over it – it allows for intellectual-property licenses to become much more flexible then with our current system of copyright, or even the GPL or the public domain.

Creative Commons’ first project, in December 2002, was the release of a set of copyright licenses free for public use. Taking inspiration in part from the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), Creative Commons has developed a Web application that helps people dedicate their creative works to the public domain — or retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions.

Creative Commons was founded in 2001 with the generous support of the Center for the Public Domain. It is led by a Board of Directors that includes cyberlaw and intellectual property experts James Boyle, Michael Carroll, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, and Lawrence Lessig, MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson, lawyer-turned-documentary filmmaker-turned-cyberlaw expert Eric Saltzman, renowned documentary filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, noted Japanese entrepreneur Joi Ito, and public domain web publisher Eric Eldred.

There’s a lot of great music out there licensed under one of the CC licenses, and even entire record labels built on the concept.

Soundclick has a list of songs that have been released under a cc license, dmusic offers Creative Commons licenses for artists hosting their music, and opsound.com is an interesting place to submit your own cc licensed music.

There are entire “albums” that have been released under a cc license such as Frame Independent, Loved Like a Milkshake – A Tribute to Wesley Willis, People Like Us and Kenny G, Subatomicglue, and the Wired CD.

Artists like The Phoenix Trap, Erik Ostrom, Black Ink, Scott Andrew, and Horton’s Choice are releasing some of their music under a cc license.

The portions of this post in italics are from the Creative Commons about page.