Yahoo! today announced a new search capability to allow people to find Creative Commons-licensed content. Coming on the heels of Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig's call to support "remix culture" at the O'Reilly's Emerging Tech conference, the move is another white hat for Yahoo among the open source/open culture crowd.

On his blog, Lessig writes: "This is exciting news for us. It confirms great news about Yahoo!. I met their senior management last October. They had, imho, precisely the right vision of a future net. Not a platform for delivering whatever, but instead a platform for communities to develop. With the acquisition of Flickr, the step into blogging and now this tool to locate the welcome mats spread across the net, that vision begins to turn real."

David Mandelbrot, Yahoo's VP of search content, said, "We look forward to helping enable a new generation of creative works based on this new medium."

Creative Commons licenses allow authors to specify the rights they want to give away and how they want their works to be used.