If the author wishes to release all rights or give the work to the public domain, then the digital code will automatically generate a "No Rights Reserved" button. The button is designed to act as a notice to people who come in contact with the work that exclusive rights to reproduce it have been relinquished under the applicable Creative Commons license.

For off-line works, such as printed material, the creator includes a statement such as "This work is licensed under the Creative Commons [insert description] License." Off-line works obviously do not include the metadata, and search engines can't identify their CC status automatically.

Expanding acceptance

Not surprisingly, since the idea for Creative Commons came from a Stanford University law professor, the first CC licenses were created with U.S. law in mind and might be unenforceable in other legal systems. The iCommons (International Commons) project is adapting CC legal wording to meet the requirements of other countries. As of November 2005, 46 countries and regions had joined that initiative and the group had completed licenses for 26 countries.

The first legal test of CC occurred in the Netherlands earlier this year, according to legal Web site Groklaw.net. MTV personality Adam Curry had posted photos of his daughter on the photo- sharing site Flickr.com. A Dutch gossip magazine published the photos without authorization, even though they were covered by Flickr's Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 2.0 license. Curry sued for copyright infringement, and the Dutch court ruled that a CC license is binding.