Al Jazeera announced last week the launch of a creative commons repository to host videos of the Gaza crises  under a Creative Commons Attribution License. This is a big win for the Creative Commons movement as Al Jazeera is the first major broadcaster to license any of its content under Creative Commons.

This announcement means that bloggers, competing broadcasters and anybody else can use the videos of Al Jazeera for free as long as they simply mention that original video was made by Al Jazeera. This would have not been possible otherwise due to copyright protection of the work. By using the CC Attribution License Al Jazeera explicitly permits all to use the licensed copyright work in any way they please, whether commercial or not, as long as they simply attribute the source.

I will hopefully write more about Creative Commons in the future. This is a nonprofit corporation that aims to create the a legal framework for individuals to share the creative work of each other and build upon it.