Is standard copyright the only option?
No. There's a new kind of copyright available, called Creative Commons licensing.
The author who puts a Creative Commons license on his work is saying that while they retain the rights to their work, they will allow everyone to do certain things without asking for permission first. Those things might include:
- Copying the work
- Distributing it
- Editing it
- Remixing it. That is, using it to make another work.
- Selling the resulting work
Creative Commons licensing is not a creation of a government, like the copyright clause of the Constitution. Creative Commons is a group of people who realized that new technologies like the internet have created new ways of sharing materials. And that authors might want to share more rights with the public than standard copyright allows. So they came up with Creative Commons licenses.
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