The innovative Creative Commons is taking their flexible copyright to the world:

A customisable form of copyright license will soon be available internationally through the Creative Commons, a non-profit organisation based in the US. The organisation already offers US artists a way build their own copyright agreement.

Each custom-made license is also designed to incorporate an identifying piece of code that can be stored on a central database operated by the Creative Commons. This tag should make it simple for other artists to search for a piece of music or video that they can legally incorporate in their own work.

The latest Creative Commons initiative is to create versions of the licenses for the UK, Japan, Brazil, Finland and Norway by the end of 2003, says assistant director Neeru Paharia. This will involve translating the US licenses into local legal parlance.

Paharia says this should greatly expand the reach of the licenses, which she says are more flexible and reasonable than conventional licences. "It's tremendously important," she told New Scientist. "We don't want to be restricted to the US - there's a whole world out there."

...."The idea is to put introduce some granularity between public domain and full copyright," Paharia says. "We're trying to get a full spectrum of rights." She says there are currently 400,000 web sites linking to individual US licenses. [New Scientist]