Creative Commons allows individuals to establish rights for their intellectual property. Music, images, written words…they all can be assigned various levels of protection. The service is based on the work of Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor and copyright attorney. If you’re not familiar with it, scroll down and look on the lower right-hand side of this page; you’ll see my Creative Commons license, which says it’s okay to copy any of this blog and use it anywhere, as long as you attribute it to me and don’t make money from it.

It’s a great service for the producer of intellectual property, but what about people who want to use it? It’s fine if you stumble on a podcast or an image you want to use and find from its Creative Commons license that you’re free to do so. But what if, for example, you need a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge that you’re free to use for commercial purposes? Thanks to Yahoo!, it’s now as easy as conducting a routine Web search.

The Creative Commons Search Engine lets you filter search results based on the different types of Creative Commons licenses. I took the engine out for a test drive, entering “Golden Gate Bridge” as my query and asking for results I could use commercially. Some 490 results were returned, starting with this one.

From where I sit, this is the most useful enhancement of a search engine to come along in quite a while, and adds tremendous value to the already valuable Creative Commons service.