creative commons

creative commons helps you share your knowledge and creativity with the world.

* Want to let people share and use your photographs, but not allow companies to sell them?

* Looking for access to course materials from the world’s top universities?

* Want to encourage readers to re-publish your blog posts, as long as they give you credit?

* Looking for songs that you can use and remix, royalty-free?

creative commons helps you share your knowledge and creativity with the world.

creative commons develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical

infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and

innovation.

creative commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools.

Our free, easy-to-use copyright licenses provide a simple, standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work — on conditions of your choice. CC licenses let you easily change your copyright terms from the default of “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.”

creative commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright. They work alongside copyright and enable you to modify your copyright terms to best suit your needs.

If you want to give people the right to share, use, and even build upon a work you’ve created, you should consider publishing it under a creative commons license. CC gives you flexibility (for example, you can choose to allow only non-commercial uses) and protects the people who use your work, so they don’t have to worry about copyright infringement, as long as they abide by the conditions you have specified.

If you’re looking for content that you can freely and legally use, there is a giant pool of CC-licensed creativity available to you. There are hundreds of millions of works — from songs and videos to scientific and academic material — available to the public for free and legal use under the terms of our copyright licenses, with more being contributed every day.

If you would like to see what kinds of companies and organizations are using creative commons licenses, visit our Who Uses CC? page.

If you would like to learn more about the different CC licenses, visit our licenses page.

For those creators wishing to opt out of copyright altogether, and to maximize the interoperability of data, creative commons also provides tools that allow work to be placed as squarely as possible in the public domain.