What are the Creative Commons?
If you look at the bottom of this blog's right hand column, you'll see this box:
It means that you (and anybody else) are free to copy and distribute the contents of this blog, under the following conditions:
Attribution: You must give the original author credit (that would be me).
Noncommercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes, like selling my yoga photos to Yoga Journal without permission.
Share Alike: If you alter, transform, or build upon anything in this blog, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.
This is different from the default copyright law where no one is allowed to copy your stuff without your permission, even if it's for educational or nonprofit purposes.
More and more content is appearing on the web under various guises of the Creative Commons license, which you can download and use for free. You can search for it on Yahoo Creative Commons Search (beta). Here are some notable examples:
Books: Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig (how appropriate - a free book on free culture) and We The Media by Dan Gillmor (about grassroots journalism)
Video: MoveOn.org's Bush in 30 seconds ads
University Courses: MIT's OpenCourseWare with subjects ranging from Anthropology to Women's Studies
Music: The Wired CD including the Beastie Boys and Gilberto Gil