Google has donated $30,000 to Creative Commons, the open licensing organization.
The charitable corporation has essentially created a new method for the licensing and sharing of intellectual property.
Creative Commons (CC) empowers creators of original content with licensing alternatives that allow them to retain copyright protection while permitting free use of their content under certain circumstances. In this way, artists, scientists and others are able to gain visibility in the wider world while protecting their content.
CC has developed licensing support for audio and video this year, in addition to its licensing support for images and text, according to Google's Code blog.
Content creators can choose from a range of options, and unknowns are not the only ones to use a CC license. Pearl Jam, for example, used a CC "Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives" license so that people could legally copy, share and distribute the band's "Life Wasted" single.
The donation comes at a time when Google has been heavily criticized, and sued, for possible copyright violations over its Google Book Search project.