The Creative Commons license is useful in a variety of applications. I’ve even started including them in the opening and closing slides of PowerPoint presentations that I make available for download. I don’t make the actual PowerPoint deck available, though. For a number of reasons, I save the deck as an Adobe Acrobat PDF.

Now, a company called Cogniview has come up with open-source software that embeds your Creative Commons license metadata into the PDF file. The app works as a Windows printer. You select the desired CC license as an option when you print a document to PDF. Once you make your selection, the license metadata is embedded in the file; you can also opt to have the document stamped with the license so it’s visible to people viewing it. You can choose to have the stamp appear in the footer of the first page linking to the full license on an extra page added at the end of the document.

You can download the app (Windows only) and view a screencast showing how it works here.