Creative Commons

Encouraging the ecology of creativity

2007This document is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/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 creatorsand 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 andwhat 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 following problem — on the internet there’s no way to “use” awork 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 areconnected in ways never before possible. Now the public candistribute works in a variety of formats of a high, and often,
professional quality and can work collaboratively acrossboundaries 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 theexclusive 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 perspective) that Creative Commons was formed to address.
Creative Commons provides creators with a simple way
to say what freedoms they want their creative works tocarry— to say that they welcome people making some of theuses 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 somerights 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, andscientific content that can be legally and freely accessed,
used, and repurposed.

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The Story of Alejandra
We invite you to consider the story of Alejandra — a hypotheticalmodern day high school science teacher, blogger, and author.
She encompasses many of the Creative Commons successstories (some of which are described in Section V).
To illustrate the impact that Creative Commons has had to date
and what more we hope to achieve, we have told each installmentof Alejandra’s story in three parts — an ‘all rights reserved’
copyright world without Creative Commons, a world with Creative
Commons, and a possible future that we are working to enable.

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Blogging
Like many people, Alejandra decided to set up a blog andused the open source and most popular self-managed
blogging software — WordPress. Her motivation in setting
up the blog was to spare herself the time it takes to phoneand email family and friends with updates about her life andto see if anyone else shares her interests. On her blog, she
posts her musings about and experiences with teaching, her
observations on life and information about history, science,and other topics that interest her. She also uploads some ofher personal photos to Flickr, the online photo sharing site
owned by Yahoo!. Using the Flickr badge tool, Alejandra
also displays photos from her Flickr photostream on her blog.

In a world without Creative Commons licensing...
Alejandra’s blog immediately attracts an ‘all rights reserved’
level of copyright protection. Unless Alejandra has a deep
understanding of copyright law, or has access to a lawyer,
who can assist her in clearly signaling that she is happy forpeople to make more use of her blog than is permitted byfair use and other exceptions to copyright law, her blog cannever be re-used. An ‘all rights reserved’ level of copyrightprotection means that no one can copy and repost her blog
entries to their own site without contacting her and asking
for her permission. No one can translate them into Spanish or
Chinese to enable people who do not speak English to readher blog without contacting her for separate permission. No
one can include her photos in a book and sell the book without contacting Alejandra and asking for her permission first.
Someone can, of course, use her blog posts consistent with
their rights under fair use laws but many people, of

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course, are not precisely sure what those are andwhere the line falls. So often potential use and reuse ofcreative works is chilled because there is no easy way toknow when to ask for permission and whether that
permission will be forthcoming.
Asking for permission can be as simple as finding her email
address on her blog and sending her an email or leaving arequest in the comments field on her blog. However, thisincreases the transaction costs for Alejandra’s material
being used. It requires that the person seeking permission
speaks English sufficiently fluently and have the time andpatience to contact Alejandra. Alejandra would never know
the people who may want to use her content because they
do not make it to the point of contacting her via her blog.

In a world with Creative Commons licensing...
Alejandra can choose one of CC’s six core licenses thatmatches her preferences as to how others use her content.
By using a CC license, Alejandra can easily “pre-authorize”
certain uses of her content by members of the public sothat her blog postings and images can be shared andcirculated around the world. Creative Commons makes it
easy for Alejandra to clearly signal that use and reuse ofher blog content is authorized above and beyond what
fair use allows.
Because posting to her blog and taking photos is her
hobby, and her motivation is to share her ideas andmusings with the world, Alejandra chooses the least
restrictive license, the Creative Commons Attribution
license. This license allows any member of the public
to copy and redistribute her blog entries, adapt themor translate them, whether for commercial or noncommercial purposes without having to ask for separate
permission — provided they give her attribution. Thislicense promotes the dissemination of her ideas, builds
up her reputation and builds a layer of permissions on
top of the activity possible within the realm of fair use.
By placing the Creative Commons ‘Some Rights Reserved’
logo on her blog and next to her photos with the statement“The contents of this blog, unless otherwise indicated,
are licensed to the public under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution license” and giving a link to the
Commons Deed (the human-readable summary of the key
terms of the license), visitors to Alejandra’s blog now haveclear notice that they may freely use and reuse, withattribution, her postings and images.

It is also easy for Alejandra to choose the Creative Commons
Attribution license for both her blog and her photos because
the Creative Commons license generator has been built into
both the WordPress software tool and the Flickr site.
Having clearly signaled to the world that they can feel free
to use her content under an Attribution license, Alejandra
is delighted to learn that her blog is being translated into
Chinese and Spanish. The translations are possible because
Alejandra chose a license that permits derivative works. The
sites hosting the translations are funded by the placementof online advertisements. This is possible because theCreative Commons Attribution license permits people to
make commercial use. Alejandra includes links to these translated sites in her blog, thrilled that people in different partsof the world are sufficiently interested in what she has to saythat they have translated it.
Like many people with a blog, Alejandra occasionallyengages in “vanity” Google searching — plugging her nameinto Google to see where and when she is mentioned. One
day, when she does this, she sees that the publisher of acommercial travel site has used six photos that she took
while on a recent vacation in Hawaii to augment its online
maps and travel guides. Again, because Alejandra chose topermit commercial use of her work, the publisher knew that
Alejandra would be happy for them to use the photos provided they give her attribution and does not have to engage
in the time and expense of contacting her and negotiating
permission. Alejandra is thrilled to see that her images
are valued and enjoyed by many people rather than justadorning her photo wall at home.

GoogleWhat could the future be like?
Within the brief four years that Creative Commonslicenses have been offered, we have already seen
the benefits it can offer bloggers and photographerslike Alejandra. But this is just the beginning.
Imagine a world in which the Creative Commons license
generator is incorporated into more blogging applications
than WordPress and more online photo libraries than Flickr. In
this world, a larger number of people who use the Internet toreflect on their experiences by sharing their ideas and images,
can have the option to CC license their work just like Alejandra.
They can then see what uses others have for their creativity
that they themselves don’t have or haven’t thought of yet.

their use of CC-licensed content — a world in which people
better understand when they need to ask for separate permission to do the activity covered by the rights Alejandra
has reserved. Although she has used the most permissive
Creative Commons license, there may be instances whenpeople still need to secure her separate permission. In thisimagined future, Creative Commons’ licensing architecture
can serve as the platform from which people can ask forseparate permission for those rights that are reserved.
This will automate the rights clearance process, provide
creators with ready feedback and possible remuneration for
online uses of their work and, most importantly, by reducing the transaction cost, encourage creativity and reuse.

Also imagine a world in which more people globally are familiar
with Creative Commons licenses and they can increase7

Teaching
Having seen the benefits and community that can bebuilt from sharing materials online, Alejandra decides to
set up a new website to which to post her curriculae,
lesson plans, teaching materials and the assignmentsthat she gives her to students. She does this in order topromote her student’s technical literacy, to make thesematerials more easily available for those students whowant to review after class or who want to catch up if
they miss a class. She also hopes that by sharing hermaterials in this fashion, she can engage with and inspireother teachers, particularly ones in similar fields, to comment on her materials and share their own versions.

In a world without Creative Commons licensing...
Alejandra can only use those materials that she herself
has created and incorporated into her lesson plans.
Alejandra uses a lot of content from other people in her
lesson plans such as photos of well-known scientists andexperiments, diagrams and timelines, and articles fromother people arguing about the different perspectives anddisagreements in tracking the history of science. These
are all materials that Alejandra has acquired and built up
over her years of teaching.
Alejandra’s use of these other materials in the classroom ispermitted under fair use and education-specific exceptions
to copyright, without her having to contact every copyrightowner for permission. However, these exceptions render itillegal or practically impossible for Alejandra to post her teaching materials online. The only way for Alejandra to include
these third party materials in her online lesson site is bycontacting each copyright owner for their specific permission.
Because many of the materials were acquired incrementallyover the years, Alejandra is not necessarily sure of whomto contact for some materials. For others, she does try to
8secure permission but with limited success because many
copyright owners are large publishers who either chargehigh rates for online usage or refuse permission because
they fear that one online copy will undercut their market.
This means that Alejandra can only post online an extremely
limited version of her lesson plans and teaching materials,
having to withdraw all of the materials from other teachers,archives or publishers. This decreases the efficacy of hersite for her students who experience a comprehensive
in-class teaching experience but a much more limited one
in the privacy of their home. This also adversely impacts
her collaboration with other teachers because they cannot
see how Alejandra uses third party materials and how sheenhances her lessons. Similarly, she cannot see what third
party materials other teachers use and how they use them.
In addition, other teachers are not certain that they can evenuse or adapt Alejandra’s materials for inclusion in their own
online lesson plans or their other works. This restricted
use defeats much of the purpose of Alejandra putting
her lesson materials online.

In a world with Creative Commons licensing infrastructure...
Alejandra can easily search online for relevant educational
content that she can legally reuse and share in her online
lesson site using the Yahoo! and Google customized searchengines. In addition, Alejandra can visit other educational
and teacher sites and, if they have also used a Creative
Commons license, incorporate their materials into her own.
She is not able to find CC-licensed material to replace allof the materials she typically uses in her course but she
is able to find some and in doing so re-builds her lessonplans so that they are not just skeletons of her own notes.
Through her web searches, Alejandra becomes aware of
projects known as “opencourseware” projects, as part ofwhich faculty members at top US universities have released
their course materials online under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. This license
permits anyone to copy, adapt and redistribute the content
provided they do so only for noncommercial purposes(which includes educational) provided that any adaptations
are released under the same license and provided attribution
is given back to the faculty member.

In searching the courseware for “history of science,”
Alejandra is pleasantly surprised to learn that there are manydifferent disciplines that discuss the history of science suchas women’s studies and philosophy, in addition to offeringsin the history department. Alejandra contacts some of thefaculty members to discuss their research and approach.
Based on these resources, she adapts her own lesson plansto add more nuances that reflect these different interdisciplinary approaches to her subject.
Alejandra decides to license her lesson plans under the
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license to ensurethat it is able to remixed and used together with other“opencourseware” offerings. Alejandra sees that there are
Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese and French translations of
the other opencourseware projects, thanks to the permissive
license, and hopes that her work can be translated andlocalized in a similar way.

What could the future be like?
Imagine a world in which educational content is publishedin at least one online format on terms that permit educational use and reuse in-conjunction with being published in
hardcopy where the commercial publisher would retain an“all rights reserved” license on that content. This flexibly
licensed content could enhance global teacher collaborationand improve the learning experience for students and thebroader community. In addition, students and self-learners
from around the world could access materials from thedeveloped world more cheaply and translate and adapt themfor local conditions so that relevant knowledge is madeavailable and is customized for their environment. By placing
learning materials online in this fashion, this may also reducethe cost of textbooks for students and improve, to someextent, access to education. With greater participation inopen educational initiatives from faculty located aroundthe world, not just those located in North America andEurope, Alejandra can further enhance her educational
offerings for her students, for example, by including
materials about prominent contributions to science
made by Indian and Chinese scientists.

9III. The Creative Commons Projects“Culture Commons”
As mentioned above, Creative Commons was incorporated
in 2001 as a non-profit organization. We first offered ourtools to the public in December 2002.
Since our inception, we have worked on our “Culture Commons”
project, which is designed to expand the pool of creativeand educational content that is free for anyone to use,reuse and repurpose.
However, soon after the public release of our tools, it became
apparent that we needed to work to make them relevant topeople in different jurisdictions and from different cultures.
To this end, we established in 2003 an international license
porting project — Creative Commons International (CCi).

Creative Commons International
CCi works to “port” the core Creative Commons licenses
to different jurisdictions around the world. The “porting”
work involves both linguistically translating the licenses
and legally adapting it for the particular jurisdiction in question. This work is lead by volunteer teams in each jurisdiction who are committed to introducing CC to their country
and who consult extensively with members of the publicand key stakeholders as part of the porting process.
Once the main porting work has been completed, CCi
continues to collaborate with the international affiliates
to maintain the licenses and adapt later versions of thelicenses, to disseminate information about the licenses andto share responsibility for the conduct of legal research.
In this way, CCi works to maintain an international licensearchitecture and an international network of legal experts.
As CC licenses were “ported” to different jurisdictions
around the world, we became acquainted with manydifferent communities that were committed to the ideas
and the practice of a commons. As we got to know thesecommunities better, we realized that many fell outside of
the strict boundaries of Creative Commons licenses andtools. To support and connect this community, we realized that a new project was necessary — iCommons.

iCommons
The mission of iCommons is to build a global movement thatwould embrace and extend the infrastructure of freedom.
Launched in 2005, iCommons works to support and promote
the activities of the global commons community, a community that can extend beyond just Creative Commons project
leads, to include CC activists and CC license users to include
Wikipedians, A2K communities and free software and freeculture activists, to name a few.
Already iCommons has brought together representatives fromthis community as part of the recent iCommons Summit heldin Rio de Janeiro in June 2006. At the Summit new plans for
projects and collaboration were forged.

Science Commons
Launched in early 2005, Science Commons is designed
to extend the approach of enabling sharing and collaboration
into academia and the sciences.
The Science Commons project is based on the belief thatscience and education depend on the ability to observe,learn from, and test the work of others. Science Commons
works to apply the Creative Commons model of standardized
legal agreements and simple technical tools to build a“science commons.”

IV. The Creative Commons Tools
Creative Commons offers a suite of legal and tech tools
free to the public for them to use.

Creative Commons licenses
Creative Commons licenses provide a simple way forowners of copyright to mark their work with the freedoms they intend it to carry. These freedoms are of
two types — the freedom to share, and the freedom
to remix — and of course, the two freedoms can be
combined. Users can also limit these freedoms inthree significant ways — first, by restricting commercial
uses, and second, by restricting any derivatives, or
third, if derivatives are allowed, by requiring they
be licensed in the same way.
These elements combine to produce six different licenses. The least restrictive is the Attribution license,
which authorizes both verbatim and derivative use for10both commercial and noncommercial purposes and places
no requirements on the licensing of derivatives, provided
attribution is given. The most restrictive is the AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives license, which permits only
verbatim reproduction and distribution for noncommercial
purposes, provided that attribution is given—essentially,
noncommercial file sharing.
Once a person selects the license that matches their preferences, they receive the license expressed in three different
formats: (i) the human-readable Commons Deed which sets
out the key license elements and contains human readable
license buttons; (ii) the lawyer-readable Legal Code that
contains the actual license; and, (iii) the machine-readable
Resource Description Framework metadata that describes
the key license terms and is then searchable by the customized “find” technologies (discussed in the Find tools).

Nothing in this design is intended to modify, or qualify, in
any way the law of “fair use” or “fair dealing.” Creative
Commons licenses add either freedoms or security beyond
those provided by “fair use” and “fair dealing.” They are notintended to clarify or enumerate the contours of“fair use” or “fair dealing.”

Internationalization of CC Licenses
As of September 2006, CC licenses have been ported
to 33 jurisdictions around the world; including Argentina,
Brazil, China, Croatia, Denmark, Israel, South Korea,
Mexico, South Africa and Spain. With the launch of
the CC licenses in South Africa in June 2005, Creative
Commons licenses are now offered on every populated
continent. CCi is continuing to work with new jurisdictions to add to Creative Commons global legal network.
In March 2006, the enforceability of Creative Commonslicenses was tested before a court in Amsterdam. The commercial publisher of a magazine had used photos of Adam
Curry, a well-known podcaster and former MTV VJ, fromhis Flickr account that were CC-licensed. The court heldthat the publisher had violated both the “Attribution” and“NonCommercial” license restrictions and had failed toproperly identify that a Creative Commons license applied
to the images. This decision is an important first step indemonstrating the efficacy of CC licenses in different
jurisdictions around the world.

The “Find” tools
Tapping into the machine-readable expression of theCreative Commons licenses, Creative Commons worked
with key technology companies to develop searchengines that read CC-metadata.
In 2005, both Yahoo! and Google developed search enginesthat filter searches to find only Creative Commons-licensed
works according to their license terms. These search filters
are now included in the “Advanced Search” page of both
search engines and also Creative Commons’ own “ CC
Search.” These search tools make it easy for members of
the public to find content that is available under aCreative Commons license, by license type, and to enjoy
the benefit of greater access to and greater freedom ofuse of CC-flexibly licensed content.
In addition to Yahoo! and Google’s customized search,
the popular online photo community Flickr recently
introduced the ability to search through some of the
18 million CC-licensed images hosted on Flickr; and,
BlipTV, an online video site, also enabled search of its
CC-licensed videos. We have added these searches tothe “CC Search” page to encourage the developmentof more content-specific CC-customized searching.

The “Publish” tool
Creative Commons developed a desktop client —ccPublisher — that enables easy publishing of content
to the Internet. This tool was developed in response to
the realization that many people who wanted to publish
online, lacked the resources and knowledge to do so.

ccPublisher is an easy-to-use “drag and drop” tool thatfacilitates marking content with a Creative Commonslicense and uploading of that content to the location of
the uploader’s choosing; the default upload location is theInternet Archive, which offers free hosting. ccPublisher iscross-platform compatible and its code is licensed under
the CC-GNU General Public License so that anyone canadapt the tool for their own content uploading systems.
ccPublisher has also been internationalized so that theuser interface appears in languages other than English.
In a groundswell of community support, five languagetranslations were included in the initial release, alltranslated by community members in a period of two
weeks. Currently, ccPublisher is available in English,
Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Dutch, Polish and Spanish.

The Collaboration Tool
To facilitate collaboration and allow people
to see the interrelationship between
creativity and re-creativity, we developed
ccMixter. ccMixter is a site that invites
creators to exercise their rights to rip, mix
and mashup under those Creative Commons licenses thatallow derivative works and sampling. The site enables artists to see both who has remixed their work and to display
those tracks that they themselves have remixed in creating
their own music. In this way, people can track the genealogy of creativity because ccMixter tracks the relationshipbetween sampled tracks, allowing people to trace the history and referencing between music and encouraging further
remixing and reuse. Currently, ccMixter hosts around 5,000
tracks of which about half are remixes.
To extend the collaborative potential of
ccMixter beyond the site, we released
the engine of the software that powers
the site as “ccHost.” ccHost has beendeveloped and extended from its initialuse as ccMixter so that it applies to all media types, whilst
retaining the key strengths of ccMixter — namely allowing
for content to be hosted, commented on, and remixed insuch a way as to show the interrelationship between it. We
have engaged in this development work in order to makeit easier for others to share and remix all content types.
This year, thanks to its extension, ccHost has grown fromthe engine that powers ccMixter.org into a communitypowered, self-sustainable, and award winning Open Source
project that is used by Open Clip Art Library (www.openclipart.org), Open Source Cinema (www.opensourcecinema.
org), ccMixter South Africa, the Netherlands-based Simuze.nl
and others. In addition, several educational projects are installing
ccHost to support and enable the sharing of teaching material.
In keeping with our dedication to building a global digitalcommons, version 3.0 of ccHost adds full localization support for languages around the world including Portuguese,Chinese (traditional and simplified) German, French, andDutch. ccHost is available under the CC- GNU General Public
License. In August 2006, we were thrilled to learn that ccHost
was awarded the Linux World Product Excellence Award for“Best Open Source Solution”.

11V. The Creative Commons Achievements to Date
Over the past 5 years, Creative Commons has
witnessed a phenomenal growth in license adoption, an array of high-profile license adopters andimportant relationships with prominent technology
companies. Together these developments haveestablished Creative Commons licensing as partof the dialogue about online rights regulation andintegrated our tech tools into key parts of thedigital infrastructure.

License Adoption
One year after Creative Commons licenses werereleased to the public, in December 2003, we counted
1 million linkbacks to licenses. By December 2004
there were 16 million linkbacks to licenses.
By December 2005, this number climbed to
45 million linkbacks.
Most recently — in June 2006 — this number
has grown even more exponentially with
140 million linkbacks recorded.

Stories of License Adopters
In addition to a phenomenal growth in the quantity oflicense adoption, we have also learned of incredible stories of
how Creative Commons licensing has assisted authors andhas enabled more flexible use of copyrighted material. Highprofile license adopters include David Byrne and Brian Eno,
who CC-licensed their album “Bush of Ghosts” and Pearl
Jam who CC-licensed a music video. In addition to thesewell-known adopters, we also seen experiences that demonstrate the important cultural contributions that flexibly
licensed content can enable. Below we offer examples
from music, film and education.
Music — Nimrod Lev and Rhythm Beating Silence: Nimrod
Lev is a well-known and award-winning Israeli singer/songwriter. He is one of the rare musicians who “made it” — hewas signed to Israeli media giant Hed Artzi, was featured
prominently on Israeli radio and MTV, and had a huge commercial hit with the song “That’s All the Magic.” But Lev felt
exploited by his label who controlled his music and didn’t
fairly share its financial rewards. As a result, Lev chose toleave the conventional music industry and use the Web tofreely and independently distribute his music. In an interview
with the popular Israeli news Web site Nana, Lev stated:“Do you know an Israeli artist who turned rich from selling
their CDs? I don’t. These record companies and various federations represent themselves and not us, and as a result we
see almost no money. If they are going to fight the file sharers,
they should not do it on our backs, and definitely, not in ournames...“ I believe that the accessibility to music is the basic
right of each person, and we must fight for its preservation.”
These days, Lev and his band, Rhythm Beating Silence, use
Creative Commons licenses for their music, videos, and art.
The trio capitalizes financially on the online viral successof their creativity by playing shows and working oncommissioned projects.

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The band, which is highly concerned with making works ofart and artists from culturally isolated countries more accessible to the international public, says that it has been able
to attract more fans than ever (including many in countries
that would not have been open to them as members of theconventional Israeli music industry) as a result of using an
open, CC-based approach to distribution.
Film — Teach: In 1999, director Davis Guggenheim (whorecently also directed An Inconvenient Truth) and producer
Julia Schachter created a film chronicling the experiences ofteachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The filmmakers created two powerful documentaries: thePeabody Award-winning The First Year and Teach – which isa short film created to attract talented and passionate
people to the teaching profession.
But after a few years, Guggenheim and Schachter realizedthat while a fair number of people had seen their film, there
was still an enormous audience who hadn’t. They also realized that there was a free and easy solution: the Web. So, in
February 2006, Guggenheim and Schacter made Teach available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives license and offered the film online to the
public for free. At a live screening in San Francisco hosted
by Creative Commons, the filmmakers explained that theCC license was the perfect tool for artists looking to havetheir work be more freely available to the world. After all,
Guggenheim noted, the whole point of making documentaries – which there is generally a limited market for – is tohave them be seen by as many people as possible. Thisis especially true with Teach, he continued, as it was essentially designed to be a recruitment film for teachers.
Education — MIT OpenCourseWare: MIT’s OCW projectis designed to provide free access to the prestigious
university’s course materials for people around the world.
It is a Web-based electronic publishing initiative with thegoal of putting materials from virtually all of MIT’s undergraduate and graduate courses online and under the CC
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license by 2008.
Since its launch in 2002, MIT OpenCourseWare hasposted 1,285 sets of course material from 33 disciplines
online. Visitors to the site come from over 200 countries.
Significantly, the Creative Commons license used by
MIT offers a free and easy way for MIT course materials
to be translated into other languages and customized
for local context. Says one OCW user in Azerbaijan:“This is a wonderful initiative, something I’ve been dreaming
about! It gives great opportunities for studying new thingsand improving my current education. Commercial distanceeducation is too expensive for people in the country where I
live, but what you did make: quality education really available.”

Technical Implementation
Embedding the option of choosing a Creative Commonslicense into the technical infrastructure of the architecture and applications of the Internet is a key part of realizing our mission. Adding to the success of the searchtools developed by Yahoo! and Google, we have also
witnessed recently another important implementation.

Microsoft released the Creative Commons Add-in
for Microsoft Office in June 2006. This software tool
enables the easy addition of CC licenses to works created in Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office Excel,
and Microsoft Office PowerPoint. The tool is available
free of charge at Microsoft Office Online and will enable the 400 million users of Microsoft Office aroundthe world to easily select Creative Commons licenses
when they are directly working in an Office program.
Once the Creative Commons Add-in is installed, theoption to choose a Creative Commons license is avail-able from the “File” drop-down menu. Upon selecting
the CC option, the user is presented with the standard
Creative Commons license generator and can select thelicense of their choosing. Once the license has beenchosen, the tool adds the Creative Commons logo, thename of the selected license, and a link to the license’s
terms to documents created with Microsoft Office.
The first document to be CC-licensed using this tool
was the text of Brazilian Minister of Culture Gilberto
Gil’s iCommons Summit keynote speech. The speech
was made available in both English and Portuguese.

VI. The Important Work Still To Do
The work that Creative Commons has done over the past
five years has been an enormous success. But there is much
more to do. We have gone from the basement at Stanford
Law School to the cover of Wired magazine, collaborated
with key industry players and featured as part of government
delegate submissions before the World Intellectual Property
Organization. Now that we have established Creative
Commons as part of the debate and the practice surrounding the regulation (both private and public) of creative,
educational and scientific materials, we face perhaps ourbiggest challenge of consolidating on that initial successand demonstrating the benefit of “free culture.” Our workover the coming years will focus on the following areas:• Building a stable “free culture” infrastructure: Creative
Commons, of course, is not the only entity crafting licenses
designed to dedicate certain copyrights to the public. In addition to our work, the Free Software Foundation’s “FreeDocumentation License” has become an important freeculture license, as it is the framework for Wikipedia. In addition, the BBC’s Creative Archive License, and the French Art
Libre license have become important elements in the “freeculture” ecology. Unfortunately, these different licenses
have not been designed to interoperate: content licensed
under one can’t be reused under another. And this incompatibility will increasingly threaten the potential that thesedifferent projects all seek to realize. To help resolve thisproblem, Creative Commons will lead a project to establish an infrastructure for interoperable licenses. The aim
will be to enable creative work licensed under sufficiently
similar licenses to move between those licenses. That
process will be directed by a board independent of,but started by, Creative Commons.

tools that people use everyday. We’ve seen, through theexample of Flickr and soon, no doubt through the exampleof Microsoft, that people are more than eager to use ourlicenses when the option to do so is easy and intuitive.
• Expanding work in education: A key part of our future
activities includes engaging with educators and educationgroups/projects to ensure that much more educational
and instructional content is available to people at all levelsof education and across the geographic and economic
spectrum. Our licenses provide a simple way for thisto happen; now we have to make sure that the peoplebuilding tools and resources know how to properly
integrate CC into their projects.
Through these important projects, Creative Commons cancontinue to revive the principles of balance, compromise,and moderation both online and offline and, in doing so,
promote and enable participatory culture. Our ongoing work
will allow us to consolidate on our previous successes anddemonstate the importance of “free culture.”• Extending the base we’ve already built: In addition
to these new projects, we will of course continue what
we’ve been best at: increasing the breadth of high-profile
projects that we can use to showcase the benefit of CC
legal and technical tools. We’ve proven that when we set
the example for how content can be effectively and, on
occasion lucratively, shared and reused, people follow suit.
We need to develop and publicize new success stories
around video, educational content, images and music.
We need to continue to work with more software companies to get CC options built into the Web and desktop

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