Yesterday’s Chicago Sun-Times had a good article about Flickr that emphasized the value of Creative Commons licensing.

It’s a magnificent library of stock art. The big point of Flickr is to allow photographers of all skill levels to share their pictures with the world. And the folks behind Flickr back this concept up with a simple but brilliant feature: at the photographers’ discretion, Flickr can automatically attach a Creative Commons license to each photo. Creative Commons allows photographers to give you certain useful rights to their pictures while retaining other rights for themselves; the creators can encourage free sharing without actually releasing their work into the public domain, if they so choose.