I remember last year when the Creative Commons project was first announced. I remember because I was excited about it. A tangible tool to help in the fight against intellectual-property rot. Wot a grand idea! All of a sudden, if you wanted to publish some work of yours, some book or song or what have you, and you didn’t want to limit it with the heavy-handed (c), but you didn’t want to relinquish absolutley all control to the public domain, you had some real options with some legal infrastructure behind them. Brilliant.

It’s been a year, and a couple of days ago they had an anniversary party in SF (wish I could have been there) and they’ve also just released a flashy new state-of-the-project animation movie. Holy Smokes. Looks like things are going pretty well. They report over a million works licensed with the various flavours of (cc). In the first year. Already people are not only releasing plenty of content under (cc), but other people are taking advantage to remix and renew and rerelease just as intended.

They also hinted that they’re getting ready to take on intellectual property in science. Oh boy. There’s more than a few scientists that are ready to accept their help. Why are we still paying enormous fees to journal publishers so we can read the work of our colleaugues who would much prefer it to be freely available? Why is electronic distribution of academic journals not vastly cheaper than the paper-and-ink variety? Why do scientists not have publishing rights for their own discoverys? WTF? Hello (cc), let’s hear any ideas you have.

I also noticed that Movable Type, whose blogging system I’m in the process of migrating this weblog to, is building (cc) options straight into the system. Cool.

Check out the neato animation. It’s big (7mb) but it’s sooper flashy and feel good (in a good way). The connected-community, emergent-behaviour, information-wants-to-be-free, loving-anarchy movement has yet another idea in ascendancy. The revolution can’t be long now.