The addition of Google Books as a partner is a significant one as the search giant's involvement promises to increase the public's ability to find works to share and remix. For now, CC licensed books are distinguishable by a Creative Commons logo to the left of the preview pane. In the future, licensing is likely to become an advanced search feature within the site. When that happens, remixing material will be so much easier to find.

For example, Google already prints full versions of out-of-copyright books for its Library Project. Once these books are tagged with the public domain license, thousands of out-of-copyright and sometimes out-of-print books will become easily searchable. We may see a renewed interest in our favorite classics, or see them altered in new and unusual ways. By showcasing CC licensed material, Google Books may prompt other companies like Flickr to further prioritize commons-friendly search.

If you'd like to place your Google Book under a CC license, you can do so in your account settings. To sign up to add a CC licensed work, visit the Google Books partner page

In addition to Wales, other CK-12 advisory board members include CEO of Sun Microsystems Vinod Khosla, CTO of JotSpot Graham Spencer and founding principal of the High Tech High charter school program, Larry Rosenstock.

CK-12 intends to make use of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Meanwhile, Wales' other open textbook project, Wikibooks, is licensed as GNU Free Documentation. Both licenses ensure that the book content is free to be copied, redistributed and modified for either commercial or non-commercial use with the only major stipulation being that author's receive attribution. Wikibooks currently has over 38,602 volunteer edited pages with subject matter in natural sciences, computing, humanities and social sciences. The project already includes books from at least 15 different languages.

According to CK-12, the difference between Wikipedia and CK-12 is that the organization "specifically focuses on K-12 standards-based content centered around the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subjects vs. serving as an encyclopedia of knowledge...CK-12 offers materials such as lesson objectives, vocabulary, and Q & A - similar to those found in textbooks." However, the group does not address comparisons with Wikibooks. At this early stage with CK-12, the key difference between Wikibooks and CK-12 appears to be that the latter organization envisions one day supplying printed textbooks via an on-demand press similar to Lulu or Blurb.

Derivative Works

While the highly restrictive BY-NC-ND license is the most popular CC license on Flickr (33%), the second most popular license (29%) is the BY-NC-SA license, which allows for derivative, non-commercial works, as long as the resulting work is licensed under the same license. In total, according to this study, about 63 million images on Flickr can be used for creating derivative works like films, photo montages, or animations.

Growth is Slowing

The growth rate for CC-licensed images on Flickr is slowing, however. The growth rate has slowed down from 13% in April 2006, to 4% in November 2008. Currently, the growth rate is holding stable at 4% per month.

Make Creative Commons Your Default on Flickr

If you want to make sure that all of your photos are covered under a Creative Commons license, just head to the Privacy & Permissions tab in your Flickr account settings, where you will find a Defaults for new uploads section. From there, you can change your default license. If you never changed it, it will currently mark all your new uploads as "all rights reserved."

Note: If you want to "Rock Flickr Like a Champ," have a look at this post.

Today, the Creative Commons Foundation is announcing a new tool called CC Zero. CC Zero isn't another legal license from the group, instead it's a legal tool that lets content creators give up the rights claims they are given by default and instead send their work into the public domain.

The Creative Commons Foundation's work is already extremely useful in finding content that's licensed for freely reusable work with certain conditions placed on it, like the section in Flickr where you can find photos you're free to reuse as long as you give credit to the original creator. A new tool that lets authors just push their work immediately into the public domain free of conditions should make content reuse and collaboration all the more friction free.

As things stand, US copyright law prohibits reuse without explicit permission for creative works until they enter the public domain - 70 years after the death of the author or 120 years after publication date if the date of death of the author is unknown. These lengthy periods leave the public domain pretty anemic. CC Zero will let content creators uninterested in copyright claims push their work into the public domain immediately.

A Well-Designed Tool

CC Zero has three components to it. The first is legal code, developed as all of CC's work is to be applicable with laws in every country around the world. The legal work was done in collaboration with two of Silicon Valley's very top legal firms, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Latham & Watkins. It should be pretty air tight.

The second component is a "human readable" text explaining how CC Zero works. You can read the CC Zero FAQ on this page.

The final component is machine readable code, making CC Zeroed content easily discoverable around the web. The Foundation says this should be particularly valuable in scientific work, but machine readable markup is interesting in all kinds of contexts. Try Googling for freely reusable content now to get an idea how this might work.

Early Examples

Two scientific projects are using CC Zero right away. The Proteomecommons Project is an academic project where scientists study large proteins. The Personal Genome Project is putting the genetic data of 10 individuals into the public domain for research using CC Zero.

The Foundation has been gathering Creative Commons case studies in a wiki since the middle of last year; that's a good place to find out about how people around the world have been putting CC's other work to use so far. Hopefully CC Zero projects will start appearing there soon.

The default copyright protection imposed by US copyright law, and increasingly around the world, might serve some people's interests well - but the availability of a tool to give up those "rights" and participate in the global free knowledge economy seems to us a very valuable effort. You can check out CC Zero on this page.

See also Microsoft's collaboration with CreativeCommons on a new scientific ontology plug-in for Office, also announced today.

Though these texts have always technically been in the public domain, the organizations had to purchase the electronic version from a private company that had compiled it. Now available at this link, they have also been converted to XHMTL so that anyone can develop user interfaces and search engines against the information.

There's certainly an active developer community ready and willing these days to experiment either for public good and/or personal advancement. The Reuters semantic web API OpenCalais that we wrote about last week, for example, has had 500 developers sign up to use the API in a single week, we're told by project partner Mashery.

While the newly released legal documents are content more than they are technology, in this emerging era of data, that distinction is growing less important. Freely available, large quantities of content are just asking for machine processing, but all the cool tools that are being developed need content to stoke their hungry fires and give them meaning. What better content to do so than a key part of the formerly inaccessible legal fabric of recent US history?