Creative Commons
Self-portrait
When we share, everyone wins. Creative Commons helps you legally share your knowledge and creativity to build a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world — unlocking the full potential of the internet to drive a new era of development, growth and productivity.
The growing commons. 1.1 billion works and counting. Explore these featured Creative Commons Licensed resources below — from literary works, to videos, photos, audio, open education, scientific research and more! Or you can share your work, and help light up the global commons! (https://creativecommons.org/)
Description
Creative Commons (CC) is a nonprofit organization enabling flexibility in copyright law through the creation of licenses allowing people to choose the way they wish their content to be shared, legally and for free. CC was started in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson and Eric Eldred. The organization’s network is currently comprised of 100 affiliates across 70 jurisdictions, with the goal of starting and fostering communities, conduct research, open communication, translating and adapting licenses for national laws. These licenses are not an alternative to copyright law, but supplementary instead. They are also not a substitute for proper ownership registration.
CC licenses are constituted by three readable layers. First is the legal code pertaining to the conditions in legal terms, to be used by a lawyer. Second is the human-readable layer synthesizing the information down to the most important terms and conditions in colloquial terms. Third and last is the machine-readable layer, the license metadata distributed digitally for the computer to read.
There are six types of licenses, each with its own feature allowing and restricting the way in which a piece of work can be used and modified, specifying whether it can be shared, sold commercially or remixed.
Publications
Creative Commons (2011) The Power of Open
Links
URL: https://creativecommons.org/
Wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20151111011419/https://creativecommons.org/
