Copyrights and CC>Introduction

Copyright means, above all, the right of the author to define the terms and conditions for use of his/her work, while the license is a legal document used by the author to express those terms and conditions in a legally acceptable form. Therefore, each author can, in principle, decide that his/her work can be freely distributed or even used as public domain good. On the other hand, the contemporary practice is such that, unless the author explicitly defines the terms and conditions for use of his/her work, it is assumed that the terms would be: “All unauthorized copying, reproduction and public performance is strictly forbidden. All rights reserved”.

Creative Commons is an all-encompassing solution for licensing of works as publicly accessible and open contents. It simplifies the procedure for the author to legally define greater freedoms for the users, different from those restrictive invoked authomatically if the author doesn’t explicitly declare his will, having in mind taht such expression of will by the author, if done on one’s own, would demand a legally complicated procedure. The website creativecommons.org offers the authors possibility to chose which rights he/she wants to transfer and get a legally valid license that expresses the chosen terms and conditions in legally appropriate manner. It is also possible to enter the work into a registry or store it in a public archive on the internet, which makes it more accessible to users searching for free contents.

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