• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, March 25, 2005

Further allying itself with the self-publishing community, Yahoo! Thursday added a feature that allows users to search millions of content pages available under licensing agreements with the non-profit Creative Commons. Ranging from digital text and images to music and video, each piece of content is identified by its owner with special licensing information, indicating that their copyrighted works are available free through required attribution.

Yahoo!'s Creative Commons Search site, search.yahoo.com/cc, explains: "While most stuff you find on the web has a full copyright, this search helps you find content published by authors that want you to share or reuse it, under certain conditions."

To develop the new stand-alone feature, Yahoo! worked closely with Creative Commons, a nonprofit devoted to facilitating the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works. And, as David Mandelbrot, Yahoo!'s vice president of search content said, facilitating information sharing is a top priority for Yahoo!.

"We'll continue to do anything we can to help users find, use, and share the content they're looking for," Mandelbrot said. "The self-publishing community has to be given the room and the freedom to grow."

Flickr, the online photo-sharing service Yahoo! acquired earlier this week, already lets users attach Creative Commons license agreements to their photos.

Beyond refining their searches to Creative Commons-licensed content, the feature allows users to further tailor searches to return pages with specific types of reuse conditions. Content owners stipulate whether their content can be reused, adapted, modified, or built upon, or can be used for commercial purposes.

Lawrence Lessig, chairman of the board of directors of Creative Commons and a law professor at Stanford Law School, considers the Yahoo! partnership a boon to his cause. "By giving users an easy way to find content based on the freedoms the author intends, Yahoo! is encouraging the use and spread of technology that will enable creators to build upon the creativity of others, legally," Lessig explained in a statement. "Our component helps people be clear about the freedoms they intend to give, and the freedoms they can rely upon."

Jupiter Research analyst Gary Stein said the move makes sense because it's a way for Yahoo! to court increasingly influential amateur content creators.

Users can find Creative Commons at creativecommons.org.