From time to time we've invited guest bloggers to write on the Yahoo! Search blog. Today we have a post from Larry Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and well known expert on intellectual property law in the digital world.

Larry also chairs the Creative Commons project. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that offers flexible copyright protections for creative works. Today we've launched a Yahoo! Search for Creative Commons at search.yahoo.com/cc which complements their existing search. The goal is to make it easier to locate Creative Commons licensed content anywhere on the Web. So you can now look specifically for works that you can modify, adapt, build upon, or even reuse for commercial purposes--right on Yahoo! Search. (It's also available via our Web Search API, as noted on the YSDN blog.)

So we asked Larry if he could spare a few minutes of his busy schedule to talk about the launch and the growth of the Creative Commons.

I'm just about to get on a plane to return from South Korea, where CC-Korea just launched. This is about the tenth such launch I've seen, and each has been more amazing than the last. Korea is a frantically focused net culture, with the biggest penetration of broadband of any country in the world. It was also the first country where the Internet really mattered to the election of a president (in 2002, mobile phones and internet chat are widely considered to have been responsible for a last minute surge in youth vote, leading to the president's election).

At the end of our final celebratory dinner, one of the judges who had helped launch CC-Korea asked me, "so what will make CC in the world as successful as CC-Korea?" And I recognized, for the first time, that this project that we started two and a half years ago had finally left home. I was no longer asking others to help; others were demanding from me a success to match their own.

This launch by Yahoo! today is a down-payment on the Korean judge's demand. Yahoo! has defined itself as the thin layer of the net that will make the net's community come alive. It's first life made the net findable. Its second life made the net useable. Now Yahoo! will give the net tools to make its community come alive. The mix of extensions announced this past week to an already fantastic base will transform the Yahoo! community into the most exciting mix on the net. I am extremely happy that our work can help make this commons grow.

It is hard to beat the excitement of these local CC-launches. But the launch today does it. Creative Commons will be just a piece -- a component -- designed to remove the uncertainty around what creators mean. Yahoo! will gather this creativity into a community. Our component helps people be clear about the freedoms they intend to give, and the freedoms they can rely upon.

As weird as this may sound -- I am extremely excited to be a component, a plug-in, that will make it easy for the community of creativity that Yahoo! has committed itself to to take off. It will be the most important step in our project's success. It is proof of the kind of success Yahoo! will continue to be.

Larry Lessig