The Creative Commons (CC) is a not-for-profit
organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to legally build upon and share.
Aim
The Creative Commons website enables copyright holders to grant some of their
rights to the public while retaining others, through a variety of licensing and contract schemes, which may include dedication to
the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems which current copyright laws create for the sharing of information.
The project provides several free licenses that copyright holders can use when they release their works on the web. They also
provide RDF/XML metadata that describes the license and
the work to make it easier to automatically process and locate licensed works. They also provide a 'Founder's Copyright' [1] (http://creativecommons.org/projects/founderscopyright/) contract, intended to re-create the
effects of the original U.S. Copyright created by the founders of the U.S.
Constitution.
History
Creative Commons was officially launched in 2001. Lawrence Lessig,
the founder and chairman of Creative Commons, started the organization as an additional method of achieving the goals of his
Supreme Court case, Eldred v. Ashcroft. The initial set
of Creative Commons licenses was published on December 16, 2002. [2] (http://creativecommons.org/press-releases/archive/2002/12/) The project was honored with the
Golden Nica Award at the Prix Ars Electronica in the
category "Net Vision" in 2004.
The main Creative Commons licenses are written with the U.S. legal model in mind, and therefore the wording may not mesh
perfectly with existing law in other countries. Using the U.S. model without regard to local law could render the licenses
unenforceable, so the iCommons (International Commons) project intends to fine-tune the Creative Commons legal wording to
the specifics of individual countries. As of August 24, 2004, representatives from 21 countries and regions have joined this initiative (http://www.creativecommons.org/projects/international).
A collection of essays, in English, French and German, on the use of Creative Commons licenses in Europe is available from the
French project. (http://fr.creativecommons.org/iCommons_book.htm)
Projects and works using Creative Commons licenses
Several million pages of web content use Creative Commons licenses. A very incomplete catalogue (http://www.commoncontent.org/) is available.
Examples of projects and works which are mentioned elsewhere on Wikipedia include:
- Opsound
- The fiction of Cory Doctorow
- Professor Lessig's 2004 book, Free
Culture (the first CC-licensed book released by a major mainstream publisher, Penguin Books)
- MoveOn.org's Bush In 30 Seconds contest (See History of MoveOn.org)
- Groklaw
- MIT OpenCourseWare
- Bob Powell Anthology
- Three of Eric S. Raymond's books, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (the first
complete and commercially released book under a CC license, published by O'Reilly & Associates), The New Hacker's
Dictionary, and The Art of Unix
Programming (all three with added proviso)
- Wil Wheaton's blog WWdN, and his two books Dancing
Barefoot and Just a
Geek
- The Wired CD; created by Creative Commons in cooperation with Wired Magazine, the Beastie
Boys, Brazilian Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil, etc.
- Public Library of Science
- Bitzi Bitpedia (digital media encyclopedia)
- Jamendo
Some further examples of a potentially-enormous list of Creative Commons-licensed sites include:
Wikis
Record labels
Tools for discovering CC-licensed content
External links
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