Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization headquartered in San Francisco, devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons licenses free of charge to the public. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. Wikipedia is one of the notable web-based projects using one of its licenses.
The organization was founded in 2001 with support of the Center for the Public Domain. The first set of copyright licenses were released in late 2002. Creative Commons is governed by a board of directors and a technical advisory board. Joi Ito is currently the chair of the board and CEO. Creative Commons has been described as being at the forefront of the copyleft movement, which seeks to support the building of a richer public domain by providing an alternative to the automatic ‘all rights reserved’ copyright.
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