Many types of open or general public licenses govern online collaborative spaces like wikis. The popular choices seem to fall under three categories: CopyLeft, Creative Commons, and Public Domain. All open licenses allow some use of content that would normally be covered by full copyright protection.

Today, Creative Commons announces the release of the Public Domain Mark, a tool that enables works free of known copyright restrictions to be labeled in a way that clearly communicates that status to the public, and allows the works to be easily discovered over the Internet.

"Some very exciting news for authors, publishers, and readers: Today, Google launched a program to enable rightsholders to make their Creative Commons-licensed books available for the public to download, use, remix, and share via Google Books..."

"Recently, the Wikimedia Foundation proposed that the copyright licensing terms on its wikis be changed to include a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license in addition to its longstanding GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The proposal was approved by a 75 percent majority of community voters as announced this week..."

"We’ve just added the seal you see at right to Creative Commons licenses that qualify as Free Culture Licenses according to the Definition of Free Cultural Works — Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike. Public domain is not a license, but is an acceptable copyright status for free cultural works according to the Definition.

The Creative Commons released LiveContent 2.0 a Free Live DVD. We checked it out and wanted to give you an overview of what it’s all about. Basically, it’s a Fedora Live DVD with free and open source content, that comes loaded with Creative Commons’ (CC) licensed material and all you favorite FOSS programs.

"BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Monday, November 3, 2008 -- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced the release of version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL). This version of the license allows public wikis to relicense their FDL-covered materials under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) 3.0 license..."

"Something significant has happened in the world of free licensing, Lessig has the details and a video. Apparently, an important step has been made towards interoperability between the license controlling Wikipedia articles (the GFDL v.1.2), and the CC license by-share-alike. (See also this post on the Creative Commons website)..."

Creative Commons organisation has launched a new version of its online tool for helping users choose a licence for their works. They also published second draft of version 4.0 of its suite of Creative Commons licences.