Creative Commons (CC) is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to helping build and sustain a thriving commons of shared knowledge and culture. Together with an extensive member network and multiple partners, we build capacity, we develop practical solutions, and we advocate for better open sharing of knowledge and culture that serves the public interest. As part of this work, we help overcome legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity to address the world’s most pressing challenges.
In order to achieve our mission, we:
- Provide CC licenses and public domain tools that give every person and organization in the world a free, simple, and standardized way to grant copyright permissions for creative and academic works; ensure proper attribution; and enable others to copy, distribute, and make use of those works
- Work closely with major institutions and governments to create, adopt and implement open licensing and ensure the correct use of CC licenses and CC-licensed content
- Support the CC Global Network, a community initiative working to increase the volume, breadth, and quality of openly available knowledge worldwide
- Offer the CC Certificate, an in-depth course for people interested in becoming experts in creating and engaging with openly licensed works
- Run the CC Open Culture Program, to support the development of a thriving open culture ecosystem among cultural heritage institutions and their users
- Run the CC Open Education Program, to ensure publicly funded knowledge (educational resources, research and data) is open and freely available for everyone to learn, discover and contribute
- Run the Openly Licensed Preprint project to increase the adoption of CC-BY on preprints to facilitate greater dissemination and reuse of research.
- Lead the Open Climate Data project to facilitate the opening and sharing of climate datasets and data models as a step toward addressing climate change
- Produce CC Global Summit, an event that brings together an international group of educators, artists, technologists, legal experts, and activists to promote the power of open licensing and global access.
- Support CC Platforms for global communities working on open education, open culture, and copyright policy.
Learn more about CC through our mission and strategy and our collection of public reports and financials. For information about CC’s funding agreements, please see our Contributions Policy. You can also view written disclosures for nonprofit organizations that solicit contributions required by certain states in the USA.