http://creativecommons.org/ The Creative Commons project, begun has created a novel 21st Century copyright scheme, the "Creative Commons Copyright". In short: everyone "owns" and can make "derived versions of" any material which has a "Creative Commons Copyright" without obtaining the permission of the originator / pubisher / producer of the content to be reused for other purposes. In this respect, the Creative Commons notion is very much like the much older idea for free open source computer application and server code, the GNU "Public License". No one owns code published with a GNU Public License. Anyone with the skills can use published working code to build a "better project" on top of it (or with the cloned code as part of the foundation of the new code).