In the past year or so, an increasing number of freelance writers, photographers, podcasters and bloggers have increased their use of Creative Commons licenses. 20Minutos, a free daily in Spain, uses it. Flickr, the photo-sharing service, supports it and recent held a CC-related contest. MediaShift blogger Mark Glaser wrote in October about how CC and Flickr are helping newspapers find photos and how one photographer is actually getting more work by giving his own work away with a CC license.

Crash course: Creative Commons is basically a flexible, customizable copyright. CC “provides free tools for authors, artists, and educators to mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry.” So you can put a CC license on your work to reserve all your rights, some of your rights or none at all. CC licenses are especially common for online works because it gives owners control (in theory, at least) over their work in a domain where it’s so easy to just hit copy and paste.

According to the CC organization, organization, “Creative Commons simply makes available licenses and tools to enable creators and licensors to license their works on more flexible terms. By applying a Creative Commons license to a work, the creator or licensor has decided to clearly signal to members of the public, such as you, that you may use the work without having to ask for permission—provided that you use it consistent with the license terms.” (For more info, go to the CC FAQ section.)

The folks at CC suggest (scroll down to ‘Verification Link’) that CC licensing could be a traffic-generator for some Web sites.