This is Why I Love Creative Commons

In the last couple of days, I've seen a couple of really good examples of why I really love Creative Commons. People have been using CC-licensed for the exact kinds of things that they should be and in ways I hadn't planned for or couldn't have necessarily expected. Beyond that, the people involved spanned the globe in ways that just wouldn't have happened even a few years ago.

First, on Tuesday, a guy named Matías, from Argentina enjoyed my little humorous look at marriage and datatypes (much more than my wife did, I might add). He enjoyed it so much, he decided to translate it into Spanish and post it on his site. While he asked my permission, he didn't need to because of the license for all of the content on this site (unless otherwise noted, it's CC-BY).

Now, those on the geekier side of life who life life en español can dig the article too.

Second was Roy Blumenthal in South Africa, who, upon getting an art project to make something about "80s", went looking on the Flickr photo finder for a CC-BY image that matched his vision. From that image, he did a sketch and eventually a painting and a lineart version. He released the resulting art under another Creative Commons license (adding the non-commercial clause as he's allowed to do).

I'm finding it funny how Creative Commons is creating enough of an incentive to result in all of this extra expression, despite all of the work being under less restrictive terms than standard copyright. *MORE* stuff is getting created *and* society at large gets more access to it than when it's locked up to wait for someone to decide that it will make enough money to be worth releasing.