Creative Commons: blip, and “Unported”
November 19, 2007 – 9:19 pm“Uh-oh!” I thought as I saw that the Creative Commons website wasn’t coming up (I’d clicked on a link to it from a wiki page I was proofreading; more about that in an upcoming entry). I did a Google search and checked the cache to make sure that we had the address right (we did), and wondered if they were under attack, or if this was just a server glitch, or if there were a larger issue. Fortunately, the site was responsive again after only a few more reloads (maybe down for a minute, from when I had first tried to go there).
I was trying to take a look at the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, because that word “Unported” had caught my eye — apparently I was out-of-date on Creative Commons terms. Even after I was finally able to pull the page up, though, I didn’t see an explanation of this new term. Poking around the site for a couple of minutes didn’t answer the question, either. Google found the CC explanation, an explanation of how to make your CC-licensed stuff findable via advanced Google searches filtering by usage rights, and a lawyer’s explanation with a segue into data (as in database) commons.