Source: https://creativecommons.org CC General List CC Team<info@creativecommons.org> (This email is licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)
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What is a CC license anyway?
The first set of Creative Commons licenses were released in 2002 — over 20 years ago! — giving everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to share their work openly, while protecting those who may use the content from concerns of copyright infringement.
Lawrence Lessig and Eric Eldred, CC founders, designed the Creative Commons licenses in response to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, a law they believed was unconstitutional.
The Act extended the term of copyright for every work in the United States — even those already published, so that it equaled the life of the creator plus 70 years.
Lessig, Eldred, and many others saw this legislation as a major threat to creativity and knowledge as it created a barrier to access while the internet, the antithesis of limitation, was taking off.
At that time, many were eager to preserve the promise of this new, open landscape as a place for a free exchange.
The CC license was one way to do this.
Since 2002, CC licenses have grown in popularity, popping up in all corners of the world wide web.
Currently, over 2.5 billion works are licensed under one of six Creative Commons licenses (https://creativecommons.org/about/cclicenses/) or public domain tools (https://creativecommons.org/public-domain/) , all offering different levels of permissions to the public.
This includes all Wikipedia content, in every language, since 2009 when Wikipedia transitioned exclusively to CC Licenses.
Later in 2006, CC launched CC Search, making open content easier to discover and use.
Now CC Search made an exciting transition to openverse.org in collaboration with the WordPress community.
We invite you to learn more about our CC licenses (https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/) and other ways to get involved in our work by visiting our website:
- https://creativecommons.org/
- Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/@creativecommons) @creativecommons
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# Licenses #CreativeCommon #Wikipedia #OpenVerse #CCLicense