The Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to build upon and share.

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 including dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information.

The project provides several free licenses that copyright holders can use when releasing their works on the web. They also provide RDF/XML metadata that describes the license and the work that makes it easier to automatically process and locate licensed works. They also provide a "Founders' Copyright" [1] contract, intended to re-create the effects of the original U.S. Copyright created by the founders of the U.S. Constitution.

All these efforts, and more, are done to counter the effects of the dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture pervading modern society; a culture pressed hard upon society by traditional content distributors in order to maintain and strengthen their monopolies on cultural products such as popular music and popular cinema.

The Creative Commons licenses were pre-dated by the Open Publication License (OPL) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The GFDL was intended mainly as a license for software documentation, but is also in active use by non-software projects such as Wikipedia. The OPL is now largely defunct, and its creator suggests that new projects not use it. Both the OPL and the GFDL contained optional parts that, in the opinions of critics, made them less "free". The GFDL differs from the CC licenses in its requirement that the licensed work be distributed in a form which is "transparent", i.e., not in a proprietary and/or confidential format.

Headquartered in San Francisco, Creative Commons was officially launched in 2001. Lawrence Lessig, the founder and chairman, 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] The project was honored with the Golden Nica Award at the Prix Ars Electronica in the category "Net Vision" in 2004.

The non-localized Creative Commons licenses were written with the U.S. legal model in mind, so the wording may not mesh perfectly with existing law in other countries. Although somewhat unlikely, using the U.S. model without regard to local law could render the licenses unenforceable. To address this issue, the iCommons (International Commons) project intends to fine-tune the Creative Commons legal wording to the specifics of individual countries. As of November 30, 2005, representatives from 46 countries and regions have joined this initiative, and licenses for 26 of those countries have already been completed.

Several million pages of web content use Creative Commons licenses. Common Content was set up by Jeff Kramer with cooperation from Creative Commons, and is currently maintained by volunteers.

Some of the best-known CC-licensed projects and works include:

• The wiki site http://www.eTheism.org - A free technology-based wiki.
• The fiction of Cory Doctorow
• Professor Lessig's 2004 electronic version of the book Free Culture. (The printed version of the book, however, was published under a full copyright.)
• Groklaw
• Memory Alpha, the definitive Star Trek Wiki
• MIT OpenCourseWare - academic course syllabi
• 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)
• Public Library of Science
• Star Wreck VI
• ccMixter A community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons
• Wikinews
• The Revolution: The official unofficial podcast of the Creative Commons music scene and CCmixter.org
• The podcast This Week in Tech

• LOCA Records
• Magnatune
• Disfish
• Opsound
• Kahvi Collective
• Small Brain Records
• Krayola Records
• Thinner/Autoplate
• OnClassical
• EGOBOO.bits

• iRATE radio
• Gnomoradio
• Yahoo! Creative Commons Search
• Google Advanced Search
• CC:Mixter - A Creative Commons Remix community site.
• Common Content
• Jamendo - an archive of music albums under Creative Commons licenses
• The Assayer - a catalog of free/copylefted books
• Flickr Creative Commons search - photos on Flickr .
• Creative Commons Find Page

With its world-wide success and early honeymoon period, inevitably there has been a more critical attention focussed on the Creative Commons movement and how well it is living up to its perceived values. The critical positions taken can be roughly divided up into the following types:

• An ethical or moralistic position leveled by some members of the free software community. Those in these camps either criticize the fact that Creative Commons fails to follow the model of other social movements (including the Free Software or Open Source movements) by failing to define any clear set of values or "unreservable" rights or that Creative Commons makes it easy for authors to reserve particular rights that critics believe should be unreservable (e.g. See Hill 2005 and the writings of Richard Stallman).
• A political position - Where the object is to critically analyse the foundations of the Creative Commons movement and offer an immanent critique (e.g. Berry & Moss 2005, Geert Lovink, Free Culture movements).
• A common sense position - These usually fall into the category of "it is not needed" or "it takes away user rights" (see Toth 2005 or Dvorak 2005).
• A pro-copyright position - These are usually marshalled by the Content Industry and argue either that Creative Commons is not useful or that it undermines copyright (Nimmer 2005).

• Creative Commons 2005 Fundraising Drive
• Berry, D. M. & Moss, G. (2005). On the “Creative Commons”: a critique of the commons without commonalty. Free Software Magazine. No. 5.
• Berry, D. M & Moss, G. (2005). Libre Commons = Libre Culture + Radical Democracy. Noema. No. 44.
• Dvorak, John C. (2005. Creative Commons Humbug. PC Magazine
• Fitzgerald, Michael (2005), Copyleft hits a Snag. Technology Review
• Hill, Benjamin Mako. (2005). Towards a Standard of Freedom: Creative Commons and the Free Software Movement.
• Nimmer, Raymond (2005). Open source license proliferation, a broader view
• Orlowski, Andrew (2005). On Creativity, Computers and Copyright. The Register.
• Tóth, Péter Benjamin. (2005). Creative Humbug: Personal feelings about the Creative Commons licenses
• Links to numerous OpenBusiness ideas - business ideas which use Open content licenses
• Richard Stallman explains his disagreement with Creative Commons
• A Debian Developer gives his summary of problems discussed on the debian-legal mailing list (note that this comments on the outdated 2.0 versions of the licenses)

• Copyleft
• List of works available under a Creative Commons License
• Creative Commons License
• Share-alike
• Science Commons
• FairShare

• Ardito, Stephanie C. "Public-Domain Advocacy Flourishes." Information Today 20, no. 7 (2003): 17,19.
• Asschenfeldt, Christiane. "Copyright and Licensing Issues—The International Commons." In CERN Workshop Series on Innovations in Scholarly Communication: Implementing the Benefits of OAI (OAI3), 12 February-14 February 2004 at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. Geneva: CERN, 2004. http://agenda.cern.ch/askArchive.php?base=agenda&categ=a035925&id=a035925s5t6/ video
• Brown, Glenn Otis. "Academic Digital Rights: A Walk on the Creative Commons." Syllabus Magazine (April 2003). http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7475
• ———. "Out of the Way: How the Next Copyright Revolution Can Help the Next Scientific Revolution." PLoS Biology 1, no. 1 (2003): 30-31. http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0000009
• Chillingworth, Mark. "Creative Commons Attracts BBC's Attention." Information World Review, 11 June 2004. http://www.iwr.co.uk/iwreview/1155821/
• Conhaim, Wallys W. "Creative Commons Nurtures the Public Domain." Information Today 19, no. 7 (2002): 52, 54. http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb020603-2.htm
• "Delivering Classics Resources with TEI-XML, Open Source, and Creative Commons Licenses." Cover Pages, 28 April 2004. http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2004-04-28-a.html
• Denison, D.C. "For Creators, An Argument for Alienable Rights." Boston Globe, 22 December 2002, E2.
• Ermert, Monika. "Germany Debuts Creative Commons." The Register, 15 June 2004. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/15/german_creative_commons/
• Fitzgerald, Brian, and Ian Oi. "Free Culture: Cultivating the Creative Commons." (2004). http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00000122/
• Johnstone, Sally M. "Sharing Educational Materials Without Losing Rights." Change 35, no. 6 (2003): 49-51.
• Lessig, Lawrence. "The Creative Commons" (1994) vol.55 Florida Law Review 763.
• Plotkin, Hal. "All Hail Creative Commons: Stanford Professor and Author Lawrence Lessig Plans a Legal Insurrection." SFGate.com, 11 February 2002. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/02/11/creatcom.DTL
• Schloman, Barbara F. "Creative Commons: An Opportunity to Extend the Public Domain." Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 13 October 2003. http://www.nursingworld.org/ojin/infocol/info_12.htm
• Stix, Gary. "Some Rights Reserved." Scientific American 288, no. 3 (2003): 46. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=7&articleID=000C2691-4F88-1E40-89E0809EC588EEDF
• Weitzman, Jonathan B., and Lawrence Lessig. "Open Access and Creative Common Sense." Open Access Now, 10 May 2004. http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/archive/?page=features&issue=16

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• Creative Commons
• A short Flash animation describing Creative Commons
• International Commons: Creative Commons initiatives outside the United States
• ccPublisher - the tool to tag your files with a Creative Commons license and to upload it to the Internet Archive
• The Commons: The Commons as an Idea - Ideas as a Commons Article by David M. Berry about the commons and ideas
• BBC to Open Content Floodgates The BBC's Creative Archive project article in Wired
• Creative Commons: Let’s be creative together (Framasoft)
• Remix Group on Flickr - imaginative reuses of Creative Commons images
• Yahoo Creative Commons Search
• the Creative Commons Community
• "Take My Music ... Please" A Newsweek article about Creative Commons by Brian Braiker
• rel-license - used to indicate that a hyperlink to a license means the document is available under that license
• "Creative Commons Humbug" critical article in PC Magazine by John C. Dvorak
• "Creative Humbug" critical article by Péter Benjamin Tóth
• "Creative Humbug? Bah the humbug, let’s get creative!" reponse to the Tóth's criticism by Mia Garlick
• "Alternative Freedom" Documentary featuring Lawrence Lessig
• "CC365: Creative Commons Song-a-day calendar" The Song-a-day calendar of Creative Commons Music
• "Mozilla Browser plugin that displays Creative Commons attributes in the status bar"
• Free the Sounds - A website for sharing and collaborating on sounds, loops, songs, samples, etc. licensed under a Creative Commons license.