Where it all began

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** Hi John,
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We're so happy you've joined the CC community, and are excited to share more about our work.

There’s no better place to start than where it all began: the CC license

You may have heard of the Creative Commons license. Perhaps, that's what brought you here in the first place.

The first set of Creative Commons licenses were released in 2002 (almost 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. That’s a long time!

Lessig, Eldred and many others saw this legislation as a major threat to creativity and knowledge. At that time, the internet was only just beginning to take shape, and many were eager to preserve the promise of this new, open landscape as a place for the free exchange of knowledge, ideas, and creativity. 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 billion works are licensed under one of six Creative Commons Licenses ([link removed]) , 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.

Moreover, in 2006, CC launched CC Search, making this content easier to discover and use. This year, CC Search will make an exciting transition, relaunching on WordPress.org.

We invite you to learn more about our CC licenses ([link removed]) and other ways to get involved in our work by visiting our website ([link removed]) or following us on Facebook ([link removed]) , Twitter ([link removed]) , Instagram ([link removed]) , and LinkedIn ([link removed]) .

Thank You,
The CC Team love_cc

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