Creative Commons

1. Copyright can be exercised in such a way that it promotes collaborative culture while still protecting the author's legal rights.
2. Collaboration, sharing, re-use, and re-purposing promote innovation and creativity - and should therefore be enabled and encouraged.

Arts & Culture - Media

Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which "all rights reserved" (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species.

Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare "some rights reserved."

(Taken from the Creative Commons website, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licen... )