Creative Commons

In 2001, a group of experts comprised of educators, technologists, legal scholars, investors, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists worked together to come up with a set of copyright licenses that would allow creators to easily share materials that were not software code, such as blogs, photos, films, books, etc.  They founded a nonprofit organization called Creative Commons and developed the first set of open licenses in 2002.

Watch: What are Creative Commons Licenses? from the McLaughlin Library at the University of Guelph

Watch: Creative Commons Kiwi from Tohatoha Aotearoa Commons, formerly Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand, with support from InternetNZ

Creative Commons licenses bring clarity and ease to sharing materials online, giving creators a way to enable others to make use of their works openly, while reserving certain conditions. As of the end of 2016, there were more than a billion CC licensed works on the internet, including works on many common platforms like YouTube, Flickr, Ted Talks, and all of Wikipedia.