Creative Commons

The Creative Commons (CC) is a non-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] 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. [1]
The project was honored with the Golden Nica Award at the Prix Ars Electronica in the category "Net Vision" in 2004.

Localization

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.

A collection of essays, in English, French and German, on the use of Creative Commons licenses in Europe is available from the French project.

Projects and works using Creative Commons licenses

Several million pages of web content use Creative Commons licenses. A very incomplete catalogue 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 - academic course syllabi

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:

The Oyez Project MP3 files of hearings in the United States Supreme Court

Olde English Sketch Comedy

Gentoo Linux (Documentation Resources)

Remix Reading UK local remixing project

Boing Boing: a Directory of Wonderful Things

Frequently-rotated showcase of South African CC sites