Creative Commons

This article is about the organization. For their eponymous licenses, see Creative Commons license. For usage of product, see List of major Creative Commons licensed works.

Creative Commons
FoundedJanuary 15, 2001; 23 years ago (2001-01-15)[1]
FounderLawrence Lessig
Type501(c)(3)
04-3585301
FocusExpansion of "reasonable", flexible copyright
HeadquartersMountain View, California, U.S.
MethodCreative Commons license
Key people
Anna Tumadóttir, CEO[2]
Revenue (2021)
Increase US$9.8 million[3]
Websitecreativecommons.org Edit this at Wikidata

Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share.[4] The organization has released several copyright licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public. These licenses allow authors of creative works to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Content owners still maintain their copyright, but Creative Commons licenses give standard releases that replace the individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, that are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management.

The organization was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred[5] with the support of Center for the Public Domain. The first article in a general interest publication about Creative Commons, written by Hal Plotkin, was published in February 2002.[6] The first set of copyright licenses was released in December 2002.[7] The founding management team that developed the licenses and built the Creative Commons infrastructure as it is known today included Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Glenn Otis Brown, Neeru Paharia, and Ben Adida.[8]

In 2002, Creative Commons was selected as the successor of the Open Content Project, a 1998 precursor project by David A. Wiley. Wiley subsequently joined Creative Commons as its director.[9][10] The licenses published by the Open Content Project, the Open Content License and Open Publication License, were soon deprecated in favour of Creative Commons licenses.[11] Aaron Swartz played a role in the early stages of Creative Commons,[12] as did Matthew Haughey.[13]

As of 2019, there were "nearly 2 billion" works licensed under the various Creative Commons licenses.[14] Wikipedia and its sister projects use one of these licenses.[15] According to a 2017 report, Flickr alone hosted over 415 million cc-licensed photos, along with around 49 million works in YouTube, 40 million works in DeviantArt and 37 million works in Wikimedia Commons.[16][17] The licenses are also used by Stack Exchange, MDN, Internet Archive, Khan Academy, LibreTexts, OpenStax, MIT OpenCourseWare, WikiHow, TED, OpenStreetMap, GeoGebra, Doubtnut, Fandom, Arduino, ccmixter.org, Ninjam, etc., and formerly by Unsplash, Pixabay, and Socratic.

  1. ^ "CreativeCommons.org WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info – DomainTools". WHOIS. Archived from the original on April 9, 2019. Retrieved July 11, 2019.
  2. ^ "Anna Tumadóttir Appointed as CEO of Creative Commons". Creative Commons. April 10, 2024.
  3. ^ "Creative Commons Corporation - Tax Form 990" (PDF). irs.gov. Internal Revenue Service. Retrieved August 15, 2024.
  4. ^ "Frequently Asked Questions". Creative Commons. August 4, 2016. Archived from the original on November 27, 2010. Retrieved December 20, 2011.
  5. ^ "Creative Commons: History". Archived from the original on October 7, 2011. Retrieved October 9, 2011.
  6. ^ Plotkin, Hal (February 11, 2002). "All Hail Creative Commons / Stanford professor and author Lawrence Lessig plans a legal insurrection". SFGate. Archived from the original on July 16, 2011. Retrieved March 8, 2011.
  7. ^ "History of Creative Commons". Archived from the original on November 3, 2009. Retrieved November 8, 2009.
  8. ^ Haughey, Matt (September 18, 2002). "Creative Commons Announces New Management Team". Creative Commons. Archived from the original on July 22, 2013. Retrieved May 7, 2013.
  9. ^ Wiley, David A. (June 30, 2003). "OpenContent is officially closed. And that's just fine". opencontent.org. Archived from the original on August 2, 2003. Retrieved February 21, 2016. I'm closing OpenContent because I think Creative Commons is doing a better job of providing licensing options which will stand up in court
  10. ^ matt (June 23, 2003). "Creative Commons Welcomes David Wiley as Educational Use License Project Lead". creativecommons.org. Archived from the original on March 3, 2016. Retrieved February 21, 2016.
  11. ^ "About the Open Publication License – improving learning". opencontent.org. Retrieved May 10, 2024.
  12. ^ Lessig, Lawrence (January 12, 2013). "Remembering Aaron Swartz". Creative Commons. Archived from the original on December 4, 2015. Retrieved May 7, 2013.
  13. ^ "Matt Haughey". Creative Commons. April 4, 2005. Archived from the original on January 12, 2018. Retrieved January 11, 2018.
  14. ^ "Creative Commons Annual Report 2019" (PDF). Creative Commons. Archived (PDF) from the original on November 8, 2020. Retrieved September 6, 2021.
  15. ^ "Wikimedia Foundation Terms of Use". Archived from the original on June 13, 2012. Retrieved June 11, 2012.
  16. ^ "Flickr: Creative Commons". Flickr. Archived from the original on February 15, 2011. Retrieved January 16, 2018.
  17. ^ "State of the Commons 2017". State of the Commons 2017. Archived from the original on October 19, 2019. Retrieved September 15, 2019.