When all you’ve got is copyright, everything looks like a copyright violation. For example, according to copyright law, I have to be asked for permission everytime anybody wants to use something from this site. Unfortunately, copyright can only express ALL RIGHTS RESERVED — I can’t use copyright to express which rights I want to reserve and, maybe more importanly, which I don’t.

As of this week, the new and non-profit Creative Commons has an interesting solution. The Licensing Project provides a copyright-complementary tool to build and attach human-readable, lawyer-readable and machine-readable descriptions of the rights reserved and not reserved for a work. Watch the “Get Creative” presentation, and use it for your own works if you think it’s a good idea. | Creative Commons | The Licensing Project | “Get Creative” presentation | L.A. Times: Group is launching new types of licenses (free registration required) | Dan Gillmor: Copyright verdict, new technology are reasons to hope