Creative Commons comes to Aotearoa New Zealand

New Zealand has recently become one of 44 countries to join the worldwide Creative Commons movement. Someone in a previous post mentioned LibriVox, the free audiobook website. LibriVox is one of many sites to adopt CC-licensing practices in releasing and publishing work on its website. The CCANZ site explains things much better than I could, but the cool thing is that New Zealand is actively exploring new avenues of content protection, rather than resorting to archaic near-totalitarian systems of Digital Rights Management.

From the CCANZ site:

About Creative Commons

Creative Commons was founded in 2001. It is a nonprofit organisation that offers a flexible range of copyright protections and freedoms for authors and artists. It has built upon the "all rights reserved" of traditional copyright to create a voluntary "some rights reserved" system. All Creative Commons tools are free.

Digital technologies are connecting people in ways that were never before possible. Creative Commons aims to help enable a participatory culture – a culture in which everyone can actively engage in the creativity that surrounds us, and in which access is assured to cultural, scientific, and educational content that has been pre-cleared for use by its authors.

Creative Commons uses private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare "some rights reserved."

Offering your work under a Creative Commons licence does not mean giving up your copyright. It means offering some of your rights to any member of the public but only on certain conditions. All Creative Commons licences require that use of another person’s work must be attributed to that person in the manner specified by the author or licensor.