Quote Originally Posted by Steel General View Post
Not quite sure what you mean by putting a "CC" license on it.
Sorry, should explain.

As I understand it, stuff in the CWBP is generally (should be ?) creative commons license. Thats a free to obtain license which is a halfway house between full proprietary "All rights reserved" to public domain "No rights reserved". Those ends of the spectrum mean that you cannot copy it without permission unless you tread carefully in the "fair use" clauses of copyright to do whatever you want because effectively nobody owns or cares about it anymore.

The creative commons license can be thought of as "Some rights reserved". Basically, the owner still owns the copyright and all rights but specifically states that people can do certain things with the stuff with some minor restrictions without needing to ask for the permission.

You can get a CC license with several options but the standard licenses cut the options down to a small set thats easily understood. The most common one is the CC attribution, non commercial, share alike type.

This means that your stuff can be copied and redistributed without permission from the owner if you attribute the work to the owner, you dont charge for it and that if you distribute it then it has to be distributed with the same CC attribution, non commercial, share alike license again so that you cant modify how its shared from the way the owner wanted it shared.

Ok, so if you release your work with that license then nobody has to ask you to use it as long as they use it in that way. And by that same token nobody can heavy handed about somebody using their creative commons licensed material if used correctly so there is protection for the people using it too.

It would be better to release stuff public domain but there has been a tendency in recent years for public domain stuff to become appropriated somehow by institutions. By using CC nobody can magically assimilate your work and redistribute it a way that you don't approve of.

The main site for creative commons is www.creativecommons.org which has everything needed to know about it.