Environmental organizations (and nonprofits everywhere) create tons of fantastic original online content. In many cases, we want to widely share this content for others to use, re-use and adapt, while setting some clear limits on what others can and cannot do with our work.

For example, we might want to let others use our work for non-commercial purposes, but reserve the right to sell our work for profit. We might want to require that other users of our work attribute it to us. We might want to let others copy and distribute our work verbatim, but not create derivative works based upon it.

Whew! That sounds like a lot of lawyering, doesn't it? And what environmental activist has time for dealing with intellectual property law? That's where Creative Commons comes in.

The public-spirited legal minds at Creative Commons, led by noted intellectual property lawyer Lawrence Lessig, have created a point-and-click set of content licenses that you can quickly attach to your work to let others know exactly what they can and can't do with your work.

Groundwire strongly recommends that all nonprofits develop a policy for licensing their online content --and offline content too -- under an appropriate Creative Commons license. Why?

• Sharing information is the essence of what activists do. Creative Commons provides a simple, standard, legally solid way to give others permission to use and share your work.

• Letting others use your work is a great way to build reputation and recognition for your organization.

• Creative Commons is the framework for promoting a "gift economy" that aligns deeply with our organizations' values.

At Groundwire, we've chosen to use the "Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike" license, which means that you can freely re-use our materials for any non-commercial purpose, provided that you give us credit and that any derivative works you create are licensed under a similar license. The whole process takes about fifteen minutes, and has already saved us tons of time answering the question "Hey can we re-use your materials?"

You can read much more about Creative Commons and how it works on their website at http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/. Also worthwhile:  a comic that explains Creative Commons licenses:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Howitworks_Comic1.

It's a fantastic example of how to communicate complex ideas visually.