Creative Commons
Encouraging the ecology of creativity
2007
This document is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
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I. Creative Commons’ Mission
Creative Commons’ mission is to enable the legal sharing and reuse of cultural, educational, and scientific works. To this end, we offer free and easy-to-use tools to creators and the public to assist them in harnessing the creativity that new technologies make possible — a read/write culture in which we can engage with the content that surrounds us, as distinct from a read–only culture in which we can only passively receive content. This paper provides a brief overview of what Creative Commons offers, what we have achieved so far and what we are working to achieve in the future.
II. The Problem Creative Commons Seeks To Address
Creative Commons was founded in 2001 to address the fol-lowing problem — on the internet there’s no way to “use” a work without simultaneously making a “copy.” This implicates copyright law — the law that grants creators exclusive rights to control certain activities in relation to their work. Due to the nature of modern technologies, people are connected in ways never before possible. Now the public can distribute works in a variety of formats of a high, and often, professional quality and can work collaboratively across boundaries of time and space. In addition, digital technologies offer new ways to create, share and remix new, derivative, and collective works. All of these activities implicate the exclusive rights of the copyright owner.As a result (and, of course, subject to fair use), any digital or online use of a work could be said to first require permission. And it is this feature (or bug, depending upon your perspec-tive) that Creative Commons was formed to address.Creative Commons provides creators with a simple way to say what freedoms they want their creative works to carry— to say that they welcome people making some of the uses of their work that new technologies make. This makes it easy for others to share or build upon creative work. Creative Commons makes it possible for creators to reserve some rights while licensing others to the public, hence our mantra ‘some rights reserved,’ as opposed to the default ‘all rights reserved’ level of copyright protection that requires you to ask permission first. In this way, Creative Commons offers private voluntary tools for creators to adopt to create a public good — a pool of cultural, educational, and scientific content that can be legally and freely accessed, used, and repurposed.