Annual Report | 2019

Image by João Pombeiro (CC BY).

Creative Commons Annual Report | 2019
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Attribution 4.0 International license, (CC BY 4.0).

This document is published under a CC BY 4.0 license which means you can copy and redistributethe material in any medium or format; and you can remix, transform, and build upon the material
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Creative Commons 2019 Annual ReportBulding a Vibrant, Collaborative

Global Commons

Creative Commons 2019 Annual ReportTable of Contents —Message from the Board Chair								3Our Mission											4Our Highlights											5									Unlocking Knowledge									6 - 7
Community and Outreach								8 - 10
Discovery											10Policy											11 - 13
Our Collaborations										13Our Financials 											14Our Supporters 											15Creative Commons 2019 Annual ReportMessage from the Board Chair
2019 was another thrilling year for Creative Commons,and for the sharing of knowledge and creativity at theheart of our mission.
We produced our biggest-ever CC Global Summit
community event and organized a major celebration of
the public domain in collaboration with our friends at theInternet Archive.
We launched a global scholarship initiative for our CC
Certificate educational program, helping a diverse groupof sharing enthusiasts become sharing experts andambassadors.
We continued our work with major cultural institutions to
help them unlock knowledge and creativity by making
works in their collections openly available to all.
And we launched CC Search and developed other tools to
make it easier than ever for people to both publish anddiscover openly-licensed material.
Please read our 2019 annual report for details about thiswork, plus much more.
Thank you to all of CC's supporters and community
members who make what we do possible.
Molly Shaffer Van Houweling
Board Chair, Creative Commons

Creative Commons 2019 Annual Report3Our Mission
Creative Commons (CC) is the world’s leading nonprofit organization removing the legal andtechnical obstacles to sharing knowledge and creativity in order to help society overcome its
most pressing challenges, from climate change to health emergencies. For nearly two decades,
CC has been removing obstacles to sharing through our open licenses and public domain tools,
as well as advocacy for copyright reform and open policies.
Today, we work on a variety of projects and initiatives that fall under four broad programs:
		Unlocking Knowledge		Community and Outreach		Discovery
		Policy
Community Spotlight
Is It Possible to Decolonize
the Commons? An Interview
With Jane Anderson of Local
Contexts
Read the interview“...the circulation of knowledge and culture depends upon
relationships and context—and if these relationships areformed unevenly, or privilege one cultural perspective above
another, then that inequity continues to create a range of
future problems...[imagine a commons] that has an informed
and engaged approach to openness; one that foregrounds thehistories and exclusions embedded within calls for openness
and open access.”

Creative Commons 2019 Annual Report4Our Highlights
Throughout 2019, we not only strengthened our existing efforts across our four programs, butalso expanded them in response to the needs of our community and the changing nature of theinternet and copyright. In particular, we:•Launched CC Search, our easy-to-use platform that enables anyone to search for andfind openly licensed and public domain images•

Organized the biggest CC Global Summit ever, with more than 400 participants
gathering in Lisbon, Portugal from over 60 countries•

Provided our first set of scholarships for the CC Certificate•

Launched the CC Global Network Platforms, which include Open Education, Copyright
Reform, and Open GLAM•

Supported the Cleveland Museum of Art as they released over 30,000 high quality, free
and open digital images from the museum’s collection under CC0•

Co-hosted a celebration of the reopening of the public domain in the United Stateswith the Internet Archive•

Helped draft and pass the UNESCO OER Recommendation, an official instrument thathelps governments support open education in their countries•

Updated the CC License Chooser to make it even easier for creators to choose which CC
license to use when publishing their work•

Collaborated with the European Commission to publish translations of the CC License
Suite Version 4.0 in all 24 official languages of the European Union•

Translated the CC licenses and public domain tools into languages that serve morethan a billion persons, including Standard and Simplified Chinese, Korean, and Czech

Creative Commons 2019 Annual Report5Unlocking Knowledge
To help realize the potential of sharing knowledge and creativity to solve some of our mostpressing challenges, CC has been removing legal and technical obstacles to sharing both online
and offline since 2001, creating the keys used to unlock works around the world. In 2019, thiswork continued through two primary areas: CC License Suite and Public Domain Tools, andGuidance and Translations.
CC License Suite and Public Domain Tools
The CC License Suite gives individuals and organizations a
simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions
for creative and academic works; ensure proper
attribution; and allow others to copy, distribute, andmake use of those works. Our public domain tools enablecopyright owners to dedicate their works to the worldwide
public domain and facilitate the labeling and discovery
of works that are already free of known copyright
restrictions. So far, there are nearly 2 billion CC-licensed
works online—all of them are available to anyone in theworld to use, or adapt and build upon.

“There are nearly 2 billion
CC-licensed works online...”Images from Self Magazine’s “Vaccines Save Lives”
campaign, shot with photographer Heather Hazzan,
SELF (CC BY).

In 2019, we continued to work on the CC Legal Database, expanding on the existing Case Law
Database. This community-sourced database compiles legal decisions involving CC licenses,
as well as legal scholarship about CC licenses and the legal ecosystem in which they operate.
Thanks to work by our 2019 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) participants, part of the CC Open
Source program, we also released an updated CC Wordpress Plugin and an updated beta versionof the CC License Chooser!

Creative Commons 2019 Annual Report6Guidance and Translations
In order to ensure CC licenses are used and implemented correctly, we engage with governments
and institutions who are adopting the tools and/or reusing CC-licensed work. For example, in2019 we continued our work with the MIT Open Access Task Force in its development of the next
generation of university open access policy and provided recommendations on how best toaccomplish their goals. We also engaged with creative outlets, including Self Magazine on theirvaccine awareness campaign with the American Academy of Pediatrics. At the end of 2019, we werepleased to help support the Global Environment Reporting Collective on their latest project: The
Pangolin Reports, a series of investigative reports released under CC BY-NC-ND documenting thepoaching and smuggling of pangolins.
Another important component of our legal work is the translation of the license deeds and otherresources. In 2019, we published translations of Version 4.0 of the CC License Suite into Chinese(traditional), Chinese (simplified), Korean, Czech, and Slovenian; as well as Creative Commons Zero
(CC0) into Spanish. Following the European Commission’s decision to adopt CC BY 4.0 and CC0 for
all its content and data in 2019, we began collaborating with them to publish translations in all 24
official languages of the European Union. In total, the accessibility of our licenses and public domain
tools to persons in their first language increased by over a billion users.

Community Spotlight
The Freedom to Listen: Rute
Correia on the Power ofCommunity Radio
Read the interview“What I find really exciting about open music is that there’s
so much to discover and everything is accessible. Culturalindustries tend to remain heavily closed, reinforcing the ideathat culture is a privilege, but CC licenses challenge that andallow you to share your stuff with whoever you want.”

Creative Commons 2019 Annual Report77Community and OutreachTo effectively remove the legal and technical obstacles to sharing, we steward and support a
global community of people and organizations who use and actively support CC licenses andtools. In 2019, we focused heavily on four community and outreach initiatives: the CC Global
Network, the CC Global Summit, the CC Certificate, and CC Open Source.
CC Global Network
The CC Global Network (CCGN) is an exciting and dynamic aspect of CC’s global work. It’s thehome for a global community who share CC’s vision and values, and is constantly expanding withnew members, projects, and CC Country Chapters. In 2019, we proudly increased the number of
CC Country Chapters to 42 and the individual and institutional membership to 504; expanding
our reach to 72 countries! We also celebrated several different achievements, including:• Electing nine members to the first Executive
Committee for the CCGN Council• Launching the CCGN Platforms, which
include Open Education, Copyright Reform,
and Open GLAM
• Shipping a revamped version of the CC
Network Website, with a comprehensive
introductory toolkit for new CC Country
Chapters as they begin their advocacy work
Participants at the 2019 CC Global Summit pose together in
Lisbon, Portugal. Photo by Sebastiaan van ter Burg (CC BY).

CC Global Summit
In order to engage with the broader open community of individuals and institutions advocating
for open access and embarking on open initiatives, we steward the CC Global Summit. Led by thecommunity volunteers through the CC Summit program committee, this annual gathering brings
together hundreds of people to discuss issues related to education, policy, culture, science,
copyright, and more.
Creative Commons 2019 Annual Report8Held over three days in Lisbon and hosted by CC Portugal, the 2019 CC Global Summit was bigger
than ever with more than 400 participants from across the world bringing insights and stories
from hundreds of local contexts. The keynotes alone featured insights from three continents and avariety of disciplines, from Majd al-Shihabi’s work on decolonizing archives in Palestine to Sophie
Bloeman’s vision of a shared digital Europe. We were also proud to have provided scholarships to150 recipients from 59 countries! In total, the event featured:
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Seven keynotes
140+ individual sessions
200+ presenters
400+ participants
Eight art exhibits
Six DJs/performance artists
Two visual artists
Two evening events“More than 400
participants fromacross the world...”CC Certificate
To help our community realize the potential of open policies and open licensing, we launched
the CC Certificate in 2018, through which we offer training in copyright, open licensing, the publicdomain, and more. The CC Certificate is CC’s first self-funded program, and throughout 2019
we actively worked to make the program more impactful by recruiting and training seven new
facilitators, registering 398 participants, translating content into Italian and Arabic, and providing
our first set of scholarships to 10 recipients. All of the Certificate content is also CC BY licensed OER.
We were also excited to find that 71.5% of alumni polled in 2019 indicated they use the knowledge
they gained from the course on a weekly basis and 62% indicated that they are consulted bycolleagues as an open licensing expert! Perhaps our biggest achievement of 2019 was publishing
Creative Commons for Educators and Librarians, a print companion to the CC Certificate. This freebook was developed in collaboration with the American Library Association (ALA) and is licensed CC
BY!
CC Open Source
In 2019, we officially launched CC Open Source, an initiative that enables members of the open
community to contribute to the 20+ technical projects that CC maintains. This initiative provides
structure and clear recognition to community contributors, including efforts by 15 external
developers to help build CC Search and the CC Catalog API, and many more who submitted bugs
and feature requests on GitHub.
Creative Commons 2019 Annual Report9To house all of these efforts, we built the CC Open Source website which gives developers theopportunity to learn about CC’s technical projects and how they can contribute. The website
also features CC’s technical blog, where we published 42 blog posts written by both CC teammembers and community members on technical topics, like backend architecture and datavisualization. We also welcomed five interns in 2019 via Google Summer of Code (GSoC) andthree interns via Outreachy. Thanks to their efforts, we were able to launch a new CC Searchbrowser extension, an updated WordPress plugin, a new license chooser, the Linked Commons
data visualization based on CC Catalog data, and Vocabulary, a design system for all CC web
properties.

Discovery
There are nearly 2 billion CC-licensed works across the web—but it’s not enough that theseworks exist. In order for them to be useful, people need to be able to discover them. To face thischallenge, we launched CC Search in April 2019. This easy-to-use platform enables anyone tosearch for and find openly licensed and public domain images from around the web in one place.
Its launch was covered by many news sites, such as TechCrunch, PetaPixel, Neatorama, Campus
Technology, and more. It was also one of the top posts on Hacker News.

“The CC Searchplatform displays over
500 million images...”In 2019, CC Search was used by over 2.9 million
people across 230 countries and territories.
Built on top of the CC Catalog, where data on
openly licensed works is stored, the CC Searchplatform displays over 500 million images frommuseums, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art
and the Rijksmuseum, as well as Wikimedia
Commons, Flickr, and DeviantArt. In May 2019, the MHz Foundation announced Curationist,
the first external product built using the CC Catalog API. At the end of 2019, we were pleased
to receive $100,000 in unrestricted financial support and $25,000 in promotional credits from
Amazon Web Services, as well as training, marketing, and technical support to improve CC
Search and the CC Catalog API through image recognition and machine learning.

Creative Commons 2019 Annual Report10Policy
While the CC licenses have proven successful in unlocking creativity and knowledge globally,they’re not enough to solve many of the unnecessary obstacles to sharing embedded in the
copyright system—the regulatory framework that shapes how the world shares creative content.
This is why we work closely with governments and institutions around the world to support themin unlocking their works through Open Education Policy, Copyright Policy, and Open GLAM Policy.
Open Education
In 2019, we made notable progress towards building
and implementing open education policies globally,
from creating an Open Education Policy with the Global
Learning xPrize to working with USAID and the Global
Reading Network to write and co-publish “Open Licensingof Primary Grade Reading Materials: Considerations
and Recommendations.” As a part of the drafting
committee, we are particularly proud of the adoptionof the Recommendation on OER by the United Nations
Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization(UNESCO) in November by 193 member states. This
Recommendation marks an important milestone for CC,
as we spent over a decade advocating for open education
with UNESCO, the Commonwealth of Learning, andmultiple national government and institutional partners.

The poster celebrating the re-opening of the publicdomain by Comunas Unidas (CC0).

All of these achievements are due in part to the success of
the Open Education Platform, which grew to include 977 platform members from across morethan 74 countries in 2019. This Platform is a hub of activity for open education advocates andpractitioners to identify, plan, and coordinate multi-national open education content, practices,and policy activities.
Copyright

CC regularly engages in copyright reform debates by issuing statements and/or submitting official
comments on proposed legislation and policies. For example, in early 2019 we signed an open
letter to the European Commission, alongside Communia and over 40 other organizations, calling
Creative Commons 2019 Annual Report11

for an inclusive stakeholder dialogue that would incorporate the views of human rights, digitalrights, and access to knowledge organisations. We also made statements regarding the European
Union’s proposed Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market and on the Canadian
Parliament’s Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology (INDU) report.

“2019 was a big
year for the publicdomain...”2019 was also a big year for the public domain—it was
the first year that published works entered the publicdomain due to copyright expiration since the U.S.
Copyright Term Extension Act in 1998. For the first timein 20 years, tens of thousands of books, films, visualart, sheet music, and plays published in 1923 were free
for anyone to use. We were also pleased that on March 28, 2019 the European Commission (EC)announced it had adopted CC BY 4.0 to share its published documents, including photos, videos,reports, and peer-reviewed studies. In addition to the use of CC BY, the EC also adopted the CC0
Public Domain Dedication to publish works directly in the global public domain. This was animportant mark of progress in the fight to ensure that publicly funded works are openly licensed
and accessible to the public.
Open GLAM

Throughout 2019, we increased our efforts in open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, andmuseums), beginning the year with the announcement that the Cleveland Museum of Art
released over 30,000 high quality, free and open digital images from the museum’s collection
under CC0 and made themavailable via their application
programming interface (API). We
also stewarded a “temperaturecheck” survey on the OpenGLAM
Principles—a set of principles
created in 2013 to define what itmeans to be an “open institution.”
In response to trends occurringin the GLAM space regarding thedigitization of public domain
This digital image of Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies (Agapanthus)” is in the public
works, we released a publicdomain (CC0), along with 30,000 other images, thanks to the Cleveland Museum ofstatement in November arguing that Art’s Open Access program.
reproductions of public domain works
should remain in the public domain. That statement received over 10,000 views within one
month, sparking an important conversation among experts in open GLAM and copyright.
Creative Commons 2019 Annual Report12We also participated in the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)
Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights to promote broad
exceptions and limitations for museums and other guardians of cultural
heritage, and limiting the scope of any new broadcasting rights. Finally, weended the year preparing for the Smithsonian Open Access Initiative (officiallylaunched in February 2020) releasing 2.8 million images and data into the publicdomain using CC0. This project is the culmination of years of collaborative workwith the Smithsonian on its open access policy by members of the Creative
Commons team, including our General Counsel Diane Peters, Director of Open
Education Cable Green, and CC GLAM platform lead Evelin Heidel.

Our Collaborations
An important part of our work is collaborating with other organizations on
initiatives and projects that support the open movement. At the beginning of
2019, we welcomed the first Bassel Khartabil Fellowship recipient, Majd Alshihabi, a Palestinian-Syrian engineer and urban planning graduate based in
Lebanon. During the course of the year and with the support of the fellowshipgrant, Majd developed the Palestine Open Maps initiative and the Masrad
platform for archiving oral history. For the 2020 year, we transferred theFellowship to the Fabricatorz Foundation, led by Bassel’s friends Barry Threw
and Jon Phillips.
In March 2019, we were selected as part of the 2018-2019 cohort of Mozilla
Fellows host institutions, and after a call for applications, we selected New
Zealand-based open source activist and artist Sam Muirhead. During thefellowship, Muirhead examined the possibilities of utilizing open source
practices in the design and animation process by sharing project files under CC
licenses. He hosted “Cut, Copy & Paste” remix workshops at a range of events,from the Mozilla Festival to the CC Global Summit. Finally, in September weannounced our collaboration with Coil and Mozilla on a $100 million fund tobenefit creators and promote innovation in web monetization, called Grant for
the Web. As a part of this collaboration, we serve on the Advisory Council andTechnical Advisory Group which help review incoming grant applications.
The image on the right is a snapshot from the Palestine Open Maps initiative
developed by Bassel Khartabil Fellowship recipient Majd Al-shihabi.
Creative Commons 2019 Annual Report13Community Spotlight
Openness, Mapping,
Democracy, and Reclaiming
Narrative: Majd Al-shihabi inconversation
Read the interview“...the tool to accomplish our goal, which is having
democratic representation of ourselves, is openness, with allof its permutations. There’s an idiom in English: sunlight isthe best disinfectant. So the more open that we are, the morecapable we are at disinfecting our region from the corruptionthat is very deeply situated in it.”Our Financials
Expenses in 2019 (USD)
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Administration 									977,397
Culture, Communications, Platform Support					448,972
Education 										433,310
Fundraising									400,936
International/Affiliates								448,410
Legal 										285,872
Technology									1,264,204
Income in 2019 (USD)

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CC Certificate Income								223,090
Corporations									625,900
Foundations									1,877,000
Global Summit Income								42,244
Individual										166,244
In-kind Donations									45,425
Creative Commons 2019 Annual Report14Our Supporters
Creative Commons is generously supported by individual donors, foundations, and corporations
who share our commitment to open knowledge and creativity. We gratefully acknowledge pastand present supporters, including:
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William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
Arcadia FundPrivate Internet Access
MHz Foundation
Alexander MacGillivray
The Elkes Family Foundation
Mozilla Foundation
Holger Kienle
Schwab Charitable Fund
Brewster Kahle and Mary Austin
FlickrSKL Family Foundation
Douglas Jaffe
Zahavah Levine
George Stapleton

Interested in becoming a CC Supporter? Please contact our Director of Development Jami Vass at
jami@creativecommons.org, or donate here. Thank you!
Creative Commons is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization as defined by the Internal Revenue Service. Any
donations made to Creative Commons are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

Creative Commons 2019 Annual Report15

Image by João Pombeiro (CC BY).

creativecommons.org