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The Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to legally build upon and share.

Aim

Their 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 of 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 is the founder and chairman of Creative Commons and 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/)

Localization

Among the Creative Commons projects, the iCommons (International Commons) intends to fine-tune the Creative Commons legal wording to the specifics of individual countries. This is because the main Creative Commons licenses are written with the US legal model in mind, thus the wording may not be perfect for other countries. As of 24 August, 2004, the following countries and regions have joined this initiative [3] (http://www.creativecommons.org/projects/international).

• Australia
• Austria
• Brazil
• Canada
• Catalonia
• the People's Republic of China
• Croatia
• Finland
• France
• Germany
• Ireland
• Israel
• Italy
• Japan
• Jordan
• the Netherlands
• Spain
• Sweden
• Taiwan
• the United Kingdom

See also

• Creative Commons License
• Wikipedia:Public domain resources

Projects and works using Creative Commons licenses

• LOCA Records
• Magnatune
• Linuxquestions.org wiki [4] (http://wiki.linuxquestions.org)
• Opsound [5] (http://www.opsound.org)
• Opcopy
• Wikitravel
• World66
• iRATE radio
• The fiction of Cory Doctorow
• Professor Lessig's 2004 book, Free Culture
• MoveOn.org's Bush In 30 Seconds contest (See History of MoveOn.org)
• Groklaw [6] (http://www.groklaw.net)
• MIT OpenCourseWare [7] (http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html)
• Telltale Weekly

External links

• The creativecommons.org website (http://creativecommons.org/)
• A short Flash animation describing Creative Commons (http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/)
• International Commons: Creative Commons initiatives outside the United States (http://www.creativecommons.org/projects/international)
• BBC to Open Content Floodgates BBC's Creative Archive project (http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,63857,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_4)