Development of Creative Commons licenses

[email AT greglondon.com]

On Wed, 4 Feb 2004 06:48:37 -0800 (PST), jordancircles-songfight AT yahoo.com 
wrote:
> I am a musician, about to release my first album.  If
> I get a creative commons license, is there a symbol or
> some text that I should put on the album cover?
> 
> Also, do I still need to register a regular copyright,
> or does the creative commons license replace it?

disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.

Copyright gives you control over who can copy, distribute, 
and create derived versions of your work.

You can place a copyright notice on your work with:
Copyright 2004, John Doe

If you have a copyrighted work, you can LICENSE the rights
of copyright (copy,distribute,derive) to people as you see
fit. 

If you want to keep all the rights to yourself, you might
follow your copyright notice with the standard boilerplate:
>>> All rights reserved. <<<

The Creative Commons LICENSES are ways you can give the
copyrights (copy,distribute,derive) to your work to
the public in common forms.

"common forms" being "attribute" and "share-alike" and all
the other options you can select when creating a 
Creative Commons generated license for your work.

So, you will likely want to put a COPYRIGHT NOTICE on
your work, regardless of how you license it.

The Creative Commons website contains information about
how to mark your work as using one of their licences,
including how to put the CC button on your website,
how to mark text, MP3's, and other formats.

Copyright registration is independent of licencing your
work. You have sole rights to your work as soon as it
is in "fixed" form (written on paper, recorded to CD, etc)
Registration is required if you wish to bring a lawsuit
against someone for copyright infringement. It is also
a way to prove when you created your work. The cost is 
something like $30 and the copyright office has a website
containing a simple form you can fill out yourself and
send in with your work.