Yahoo! has unveiled a new Creative Commons search tool that makes it easier to find “some rights reserved,” or flexible-copyrighted, content. This is very progressive move on Yahoo’s part, and a big boost for the alternative copyright movement. Three cheers for Yahoo! for endorsing a less restrictive model for creative work!
At the moment, Yahoo! allows you to search for CC material either on the web or in Creative Commons’ own library. At least for now, it’s not possible to search within different media types – i.e. video, image, etc – though you can distinguish in your search between content available “for commercial purposes,” and content that you can “modify, adapt, or build upon.”
UPDATE: Larry Lessig, chair of the Creative Commons project, comments on Yahoo! move:
“This is exciting news for us. It confirms great news about Yahoo!. I met their senior management last October. They had, imho, precisely the right vision of a future net. Not a platform for delivering whatever, but instead a platform for communities to develop. With the acquisition of Flickr, the step into blogging and now this tool to locate the welcome mats spread across the net, that vision begins to turn real.”
See article:
“Yahoo adds search for ‘flexible’ copyright content”.