Creative Commons has licenses that allows certain uses for a piece of work while keeping the copyright, which is referred to as "some rights reserved", as long as credit is given to the original creator of the piece of work. With traditioanl copyright, a piece of work usually has "all rights reserved", which means that no one can use copyrighted material without the permission of the person who created the work. A person can also avoid dealing with copyright altogether by using "no rights reserved", which allows open sharing of a piece of work to anyone.
As Esther Wojcicki noted in her online article, "Creative Commons in 2009,, the Accomplishments of Worldwide Sharing", she noted that some major websites have adopted CC licensing, such as Google and Yahoo. The Image search results on these sites now restrict users to find images tagged with CC licensing so that people can share and use images without breaking copyright laws.
I believe that CC as a tool for independent content producers is neat because people can acknowledge another person's work that may not be well known, and credit will be given to that person, and may also give them a big break, especially for someone like a musician that's trying to make it big. If a major recording artist uses a local artist that they may know but not everyone knows, the major artist can give credit to the other artist for using some of their work, and people may notice that their work is creative and they may become known as well. This helps artists like John Woodward since he uses CC licensing. It allows people to use, sample, or remix his work, as long as people give him credit for his piece of work. He may also be able to profit off of people using his work as well.
Here's an example of me using a photo from a creative commons website. It is a creative commons logo idea from Flickr user labguest:
The Flickr user had "some rights reserved", which meant that I could use his logo idea as long as I wasn't using it for commercial use and as long as I give hime credit for it.
Creative Commons is very cool because it doesn't have all of the restrictions of traditional copyright laws. It allows people to use other people's content as long as the person gives the origianl person credit for the work, which in the end saves a lot of hassle. Creative Commons is definitely the future for copyright and for media in general.
Information from blog post found from the following links:
http://creativecommons.org/about/what-is-cc
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/esther-wojcicki/creative-commons-in-2009_b_366548.html
Photo found at the following link:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/labguest/3287937707/
YouTube videos found at the following links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BESbnMJg9M&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io3BrAQl3so&feature=related
