Wired on Friday: Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit company, founded in 2001 by American lawyer Lawrence Lessig with a curious aim: to look for ways to reduce the rights held by copyright holders. Or at least, those holders who want to have their rights reduced.

The idea that people would seek out a way to waive rights to their own creations may seem odd. Consider this, however: every e-mail, every word you say or write, every doodle you make in a notebook margin is, by law, copyrighted for 70 years after your death.

That means it is, by default, illegal for anyone to copy or use it. Without the explicit permission of you or whoever inherits your copyrights after death, no copies can be made, nor back-ups, nor can any of your "works" be digitally preserved.

Amazingly, before Creative Commons came along, there was no easy way of undoing the fixed and prolonged contract of copyright law. Artists who wanted others to use their works, or individuals who just wanted to improve their chances of their work being spread or archived by offering free redistribution rights, had no easy, legal way of releasing their works.

Like artists locked into a contract for the rest of their lives, there was no way to escape. You literally couldn't give your work away.

To fix this, Creative Commons's lawyers developed a simple range of licences that explicitly permitted certain uses. Attaching one of these boilerplate licences to your work - or linking to it on the web, freed your endeavour from the default copyright restrictions.

For instance, you could state that your works could be distributed non-commercially on an internet filesharing network, but not resold for profit. Or you could allow that anyone could copy or base works on your creation, but only if they gave you credit.

At the launch of the licences in 2002, the most commonly asked question was this: were there really that many generous artists in the world?

The answer, two years on, seems to be quite a few. At last count, Yahoo! recorded more than 10 million web pages that referred back to the individual CC licences. Each link represents someone choosing to reserve only some rights to their work.

According to Glenn Otis Brown, executive director of Creative Commons, perhaps half of those 10 million pages are licence grants for web pages; a fifth for music; another fifth for images, and the remainder are for movies and other media.

CC is certainly popular enough to have become quite trendy: a recent issue of Wired magazine carried a covermounted CD with Creative Commons' licensed content, including tracks by The Beastie Boys, David Byrne and veteran rapper Chuck D. But then, perhaps those artists can afford the luxuty.

What's perhaps more surprising is that generosity is not the only incentive. Several companies have found compelling business cases for selecting Creative Commons licences for their output.

One of those companies is BioMed Central, a scientific journal publisher in the UK.In most fields of scientific research, papers are published without payment, with established journals paying for the costs of peer-reviewing and publishing in return for complete copyright control.

Transferring copyright means that the original authors cannot republish their own work. Yet journal subscriptions are so expensive (often thousands of euros per year), that few institutions can afford to make all papers available.

BioMed allows authors to retain their copyright. Furthermore, they require that all articles they publish be under a variation of one of the Creative Commons licences. This gives readers the freedom to quote freely and redistribute the original work.

"For us, open access to the scientific literature is about more than simply not charging for access," explains Matthew Cockerill, technical director, BioMed Central. "The scientific community should be free to develop ways to add value to the published research, and to do so, they need rights to redistribute and reuse."

BioMed Central sees a market advantage to their position. Scientists and organisations still go through the rigours of having their papers peer-reviewed and accepted, and still pay a fee to have them published.

But BioMed Central's open-access policy means their work will spread further, be archived in more places, and be easily included in future research and academic curricula. As one scientist noted: "In the short time our article has been online, we have had 4,000 hits. This is the most visible work of my 44-year career."

With over 500 institutional members so far and over 100 active journals, the model seems to be working. Creative Commons is expanding internationally and in the scope of its mission. This week Chile, South Korea, and China are all expected to announce finalised local versions of the CC licences, with a couple of dozen more countries in the works - including Ireland.

Creative Commons is working with University College Cork's law department to create the Irish version, currently available as a public draft at http://creativecommons.org/worldwide/ie/.

All in all, Lawrence Lessig's orginal vision of creating a pool of free content is becoming a respectable library of works.

However, this success makes its own problems. Some critics have wondered if the availability of CC licences reduces the drive for copyright reform.

Advocates of stronger copyright, such as the American record industry's ex-spokesperson Hilary Rosen, see Creative Commons as a bulwark against changes in the law. If Creative Commons work so well, why do we need to loosen the length and vigour of copyright law at all?

Brown hopes the Creative Commons effort doesn't come across as a replacement for the traditional rights people have had under copyright: rights that many see as being threatened by the recent rafts of strong copyright legislation.

"We've tried from the beginning to make clear that we're not a robust replacement for rights such as fair use. It's an oxymoron to give permission for a right," he says.

With many millions of works provided under their licences, it would be tempting to call CC's work a triumph of the commons.

But with international laws that make every jotting a copyrighted work, all their generously-licensed content in the world is a speck; nowhere close to even 1 per cent of the content fashioned since their launch.

That remainder is guarded by the tightest copyright laws the world has ever seen and there are signs that those restrictions will get even tighter.