Chris Sherman, Finding Free Content in the Creative Commons, SearchDay, March 3, 2005. Excerpt: 'Looking for photos, music, text, books and other content that's free to share or modify for your own purposes? The Creative Commons search engine can help you find tons of (legally) free stuff on the web....Today, the Creative Commons organization estimates that more than 5 million web sites link to its license. That's a lot of content, most of which is available for free or nominal charge. The Creative Commons search engine (powered by Nutch, which we've previously covered) makes it easy to find this content. You can search for Creative Commons audio, images, text, video, and other formats that are free to share online. You can also limit your search to works that you are free to modify, adapt, or build upon, or even use for commercial purposes. Search results are labeled with icons, indicating whether works are in the public domain, whether they can be re-used or modified and so on.'
(PS: As far as I know, the CC search engine is the only publicly available search engine to read the machine-readable CC licenses and make that licensing information available to users through annotations and search filters. However, any other search engine could add these features at any time. Why the delay? If they're waiting for a critical mass of CC content, I would think it's already there. If they're waiting for perceived user demand, then let your favorite search engine know that this is something you care about.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/03/2005 05:36:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
