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Hi, Chris, Indeed. Creative Commons is a descendent of the GNU. I alluded to Creative Commons in the earlier note on "copyright" as one of the copyleft regimes, probably the best known and most widely used. This is the copyleft regime used by International Journal of Design -- I shold have been more explicit. But as Jeremy of Creative Commons, this is a license that rests on copyright. As I noted on copyleft in general, many legal scholars argue that copyleft rests on copyright -- that is, the vested right of the creator in his or her intellectual property. Under the laws of most nations signing the international copyright conventions, this is the foundation of all IP law. It protects any creation prior to publication or the explicit transfer of rights. The main reason for providing the two notes and the appended sources is to provide some of the history on these issues and up-to-date web sites. In all legal issues, history, precedent and conventions -- cultural and legal -- have a great deal to do with what happens at any moment. My copyleft note was written at the start of the decade, but the web sites are continually up-dated. The concepts and precedents remain the foundation of current law. The best source on copyright remains the 2003 edition of Paul Goldstein's book, Copyright's Highway, published by Stanford University Press. One could probably practice a form of radical copyleft -- rather like David Mayor's idea -- by explicitly and irrevocably releasing an item into public domain. The Creative Commons license is resembles Bucky Fuller's idea: protecting the work from the control of wealthy and powerful organizations while making it accessible to the general public. Except, of course, that Fuller used copyright to do this, while Creative Commons uses a specific license that grants permission. Yours, Ken On Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:01:13 +0100, Chris Rust <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >And today we have Creative Commons which provides a rich array of >licences to do this and many other things http://creativecommons.org/