Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization driving innovation on the Web by offering legal structures for breaking away from the massively proprietary systems that have dominated the last 100 years. They've published a series of licenses allow publishers to restrict some rights while releasing others. In essence, CC has enabled the Mashup - enabled massive creativity.
This diagram (from CC's site) shows the range of your legal license options - from the traditional all rights reserved (c) to no rights reserved at the far end (pd) or public domain - with (cc) smack dab in the middle. 
Listen to this video describing CC's basics:
Learn more about Creative Commons here:
The Creative Commons Web site
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