We’re happy to launch today with the news that our lead developer, Esteban Panzeri (above), is releasing a new WordPress plug-in to the WordPress community. It’s called Creative Commons Reloaded, and it lets individual blogs or group blogs assign Creative Commons licenses on a post-by-post basis.

That’s especially useful at sites like Socialbrite, where some of us (me, Beth, Ken) release our works under a CC Attribution license, while others (Amy, John, Katrin) use a CC Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike license. Creative Commons lets you fine-tune your copyright, allowing others to reuse it as you specify.

I asked Esteban, a tech guru/analyst at Lenovo in Buenos Aires, why he developed the plug-in on his own time. “I think the old copyright model is outdated,” he said. “It does not fit the digital era. I’m convinced that it strangles creativity and it is bad for business. Creative Commons is a good step in the right direction. With so many excellent blogs out there, I thought it would be a nice way to help all those authors get a simple way to license their work. That and ‘giving back to the community’ that has helped me achieve so much.”

He cited Michael Geist’s recent post pointing to a new Harvard Business Chool working paper that suggests weaker copyright protection has benefited society.

Esteban — who happens to be the most capable programmer I’ve ever worked with (he Twitters in English here and in Spanish here) — was quick to credit Nathan Yergler (whom I worked with four years ago when he developed the original CC Uploader app for Ourmedia), who created the original WordPress plug-in, WpLicense, which applies to an entire site and which CC Reloaded is built upon.

Some details about the plug-in:

• Esteban is aiming to post it on the WordPress.org plug-in directory on July 6. It’s already fully functional on this blog (see below) and he’s now working on the documentation.

• On your Add New Post page, you’ll see a “Creative Commons Licensing” area that lets you check boxes sayng whether you want to allow others to remix your work, to allow or prohibit commercial uses and to require Share-Alike usage. You can also choose a jurisdiction for your license if you’d like.

• You can customize the look as you’d like. We chose a brighter Creative Commons logo, and styled it with a top border and tinted background by tweaking the CSS.

Thanks, Esteban, nice to see that your development work on Socialbrite is already paying dividends!

Update:

• See Socialbrite developer releases CC plug-in

• You can find the plug-in here: WP License Reloaded

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