Some material on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons copyright license.

"Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that offers flexible copyright licenses for creative works."
  -CreativeCommons.org, November 17, 2005

Well, that's a very good question. I'm skeptical of Creative Commons. In some cases, their ideas seem very applicable, and in others misguided. Sometimes it seems like the CC is more about opposing the idea of private ownership than about promoting sensible use. Anyhow, they're probably just meaningless as people have been copying images and whatnot on the web for ages without them, and no one who is opposed to this intellectual black market is likely to grant a CC license. But, for the time being, they're not hurting anyone, and they're providing a way for you to be able to use my creative works and sleep at night.

No and yes. Plagiarism and copyright violation are not the same thing, although they depend on similar ideas. Copyright is all about money and the quantity of material you reproduce. Plagiarism is about honesty and the way in which you reproduce material. Check it out...

Let's say you write a book, and you quote a paragraph in your book from another book by somebody else in order to show their opinion on your topic. You didn't commit plagiarism or copyright violation.

Now let's say you write a book, and you quote ten pages from that person's book in order to show their opinion. You still haven't committed plagiarism because you haven't taken credit for their work. But you have violated copyright by reproducing too much of the other person's book. If they take you to court, what they'll try to prove is that you reproduced so much of their book that you hurt their sales.

The important point is that Creative Commons lets you get away with quoting ten pages from somebody's book, but you still have to give credit to the author it. A Creative Commons license doesn't let you copy somebody else's work. Let's say you write that book, and you copy a sentence of it into your own book. That author would have a hard time proving you hurt them economically, but you're gonna get kicked out of school.

Okay. I like buttons. By my definition, a button is a 80x15 graphic. What follows is a collection of Creative Commons buttons. Some I got from Google. Others are ones I made myself. You are welcome to them.