Dammit, I’m late with this, but you still have a day to help Creative Commons meet their year-end fundraising goal. If you don’t know what CC is, you should. Seriously, you should. They are important for anyone who has any interest in any kind of art or creative endeavour (including science — PLoS Biology, the flagship Open Access journal, is published under a CC licence). Briefly:
Creative Commons is a new system, built within current copyright law, that allows you to share your creations with others and use music, movies, images, and text online that’s been marked with a Creative Commons license. If you’re looking for more in-depth information, our About section contains more about the history, concepts and people behind the organization. To see the Creative Commons in action, try out our Find, Create, and Share sections, or one of the sections devoted to Audio, Video, Images, Text, and Education.
There is also, of course, a FAQ. Right now, CC needs less than $10K to meet their fundraising goal. They need to raise $225K from public donations by the end of the year in order to secure their public charity status and retain foundation funding; Lessig explains, and talks about what they plan to do with the money, here. If you can, please help out.
Update: target met. The need for donations is not so critical now, but it’s not going away, so please consider supporting Creative Commons when you’re deciding where to spend your philanthropy budget.