Founded in 2001, Creative Commons is a non-profit US corporation founded on the notion that some people may not want to exercise all of the intellectual property rights the law affords them.
Its aim is to encourage creativity and innovation by paving a middle ground between "All rights reserved" and anarchy. It describes this as "Some rights reserved."
Inspired partly by the GNU General Public License developed by the Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons has drafted licences that give the public some rights to use and manipulate the work of authors and artists, while allowing the authors to retain some rights, such as those permitting commercial exploitation.
While the original model is US-based, international licences are being developed that comply with the laws of the specific countries involved. International licences are already in operation in Japan, Finland, Germany, Brazil and the Netherlands, while the process for developing the licence is underway in 15 more countries, including the UK.
The UK process is almost complete, and on Monday, Larry Lessig, chair of the Creative Commons project, came to London to launch the UK version of the licence and a public consultation into the proposals. This will run until 18th October, and the licence itself will be officially available from 1st November.
The launch comes four months after the BBC announced that it would be using the Creative Commons model as the basis for its planned Creative Archive, which will allow people to download clips of BBC factual programmes from bbc.co.uk for non-commercial use, keep them on their PCs, and manipulate and share them, so making the BBC's archives more accessible to licence fee-payers.