Some of you may have noticed a new little piece at the end of each podcast listing that looks like this:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
These little boxes with letters in them are Creative Commons Licenses - meaning that we, as the A&S Podcast team, have decided to indicate clearly what type of copyright we would like to exert over our own work. The "Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike" license means that people may use the podcast for non-commercial purposes (ie, to share for free, for educational purposes, remix for whatever purposes they wish, etc), they must attribute the work to its originator (whoever is listed as the producer for the podcast), and is obligated to share their derivative work under a similar CC license.
If you haven't heard of Creative Commons, it's an alternative to traditional all-rights-reserved copyright that we're used to (and that we encounter most often, even online) -- it's a means of expressing whether or not the thing you have made is okay to share, re-post, re-mix, or use for commercial purposes. There's also a plan for the A&S podcast archives to be mirrored on archive.org, a non-profit repository for digital artifacts such as text, audio, and video pieces that were 'born digital.' I'm excited to contribute to public media and make our podcasts even more accessible!