IBM, outside of their endeavors in personal computing and technology, is an active participant in the world of open source technology. It should come as no surprise then that IBM has an article on their website titled Mastering the Creative Commons. Filed in their “Web Development | Open Source” series, Uche Ogbuji does a nice job summing up what CC does:

Creative Commons (CC) is an organization of lawyers, technical experts, and managers, with a very broad community, whose goal is to “use private rights to create public goods”, by allowing creators to express degrees of licensing between the knee-jerk “all rights reserved” and public domain (in other words, “no rights reserved”). Creative Commons provides the legal framework and text of licenses that allow you to say that “some rights are reserved”, and allows this to be clearly discovered by others, so that they can determine whether their use is compatible with your reservations. The lawyers are involved when these reusable licenses are crafted and updated, with support and feedback from the community, with the idea that afterwards, the sharing can proceed on the Web with much less legal interference. In this article, learn how to express CC licenses for your work, how to use public services for finding work from others you can use, and how to identify such work yourself.

The article explains what our licenses do, how to license a work under CC, how to indicate that a work is CC-licensed (including a discussion of RDFa), and how to find CC-licensed works. While the article is available online and as a free PDF download, it is unfortunately not under a CC license. Regardless, it is great to see an organization like IBM support CC accurately and whole heartedly like this.