Founding
Founded in 2001 with the generous support of the Center for the Public Domain, CC is led by a Board of Directors comprised of thought leaders, education experts, technologists, legal scholars, investors, entrepreneurs and philanthropists.
Creative Commons licenses
In December 2002, Creative Commons released its first set of copyright licenses for free to the public. Creative Commons developed its licenses — inspired in part by the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) — alongside a Web application platform to help you license your works freely for certain uses, on certain conditions; or dedicate your works to the public domain. In the years following the initial release, Creative Commons and its licenses have grown at an exponential rate around the world. The licenses have been further improved, and ported to over 50 jurisdictions.
Science
Since 2005, Creative Commons has undertaken projects to build commons-based infrastructure for science through identifying and lowering unnecessary barriers to research, crafting policy guidelines and legal agreements, and developing technology to make research, data and materials easier to find and use.
Education
Creative Commons also works to minimize legal, technical, and social barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials, with dedicated projects in this field since starting in 2007.
Global infrastructure for sharing
Creative Commons licenses, public domain tools, and supporting technologies have become the global standard for sharing across culture, education, government, science, and more.
Milestones
2001
- Creative Commons founded.
2002
- Version 1.0 licenses released.
2003
- Approximately 1 million licenses in use.
2004
- Estimated 4.7 million licensed works by the end of the year.
- Version 2.0 released.
2005
- Estimated 20 million works.
- Version 2.5 released.
- Science projects at Creative Commons launched.
2006
- Estimated 50 million licensed works.
2007
- Estimated 90 million licensed works.
- Version 3.0 released.
- 5th birthday of CC licenses. Event featured performance by Gilberto Gil.
- Education projects launch.
2008
- Estimated 130 million CC licensed works.
- Lawrence Lessig steps down as CEO, replaced by Joi Ito.
- New Nine Inch Nails album released under CC.
- CC launches fundraising campaign with support from Jesse Dylan and Jonathan Coulton.
2009
- Estimated 350 million CC licensed works.
- CC0 launched.
- Wikipedia migrates to CC Attribution-ShareAlike as its main content license.