Copyright laws are getting ever more restrictive, and many content owners are pursuing increasingly Draconian enforcement actions against alleged information thieves. In response, a group called the Creative Commons has developed a less restrictive set of copyright principles that keep “some rights reserved” while allowing users to download, share and even modify online content.
Today’s SearchDay article, Finding Free Content in the Creative Commons, focuses on a specialized search engine that’s designed to find the millions of music, photo, video and text files on the web that have been published under the Creative Commons license. It’s a great resource, and a unique way to find content that’s difficult if not impossible to surface with a general purpose search engine.