Creative Commons is an organization made up of lawyers, activists, and information technology specialists which creates licenses to allow authors to share their works and is inspired by the GUN General Public License (GPL). Creative Commons licensing gives authors the opportunity to collaborate and learn from each other without completely giving up all rights of ownership. They can share their creations, maintaining the right to decide to what extent they would like their works opened to the public. This is made possible by the variety of licenses provided to authors from Creative Commons. These licenses provide a balance between restriction of use and enabling others to use material for further creative development.

Every work is given a copyright immediately after creation, giving the author “all rights reserved” under law. This means that in order to distribute, use, or build on a creation one must obtain permission from the original author. Rather then competing with copyright, Creative Commons is simply working with the copyright law in order to give access to all types of works including scholarship, music, film, literature and photography.

If you would like to learn more, visit Creative Commons and see the Creative Commons Get Creative flash movie.