Who are we?

Creative Commons (CC) is a United States-based nonprofit 501(c)3 organization that provides open content copyright licenses, public domain tools, and resources on copyright and information literacy in the digital age. Creative Commons licenses are used widely by institutions, governments, and creators, educators, and innovators everywhere. Over 2 billion works of art, images, texts, research, video, audio, textbooks, 3D models, datasets etc. have been released under CC licenses, and it's likely that you have benefited from it.

Open Source Projects

CC’s small engineering team builds essential open source infrastructure for CC-licensed and public domain content. Our tools make it easier for anyone to:

• release original content under an open license.
• find and responsibly reuse openly licensed and public domain content.
• connect to the larger ecosystem of openly licensed content on the internet.

Our projects include:

• The CC license chooser [repository], an educational tool that allows users to pick the right license for their needs.
• The CC WordPress plugin [repository], which allows WordPress users to easily release their content under a CC license or tool.
• The CC legal database [repository], which lists legal precedents and articles related to CC licenses.
• Our new CC legal tool infrastructure, which will serve legal code, human readable deeds, and machine readable RDFs for all 630+ unique Creative Commons licenses (across all jurisdictions), plus translations.
• CC Vocabulary [repository], our open web design system.
  ...and many more!

Read more about our projects and community at CC Open Source and about Creative Commons here.

Why sponsor us?

Why Creative Commons?

There is no other organization working on stewarding open content licenses and systematically reducing barriers to creating more content under open licenses. You have almost certainly benefited from content licensed under a Creative Commons license (if you've ever read Wikipedia or Stack Overflow, for example). CC licenses are also used in open source work for documentation, assets, and other supplementary materials.

The more people participate in and support the CC community, the more good we can do! Plus, we're a nonprofit, so your donations are tax-deductible.

Why Open Source at Creative Commons?

CC’s open source products are a public good and provide critical infrastructure for the open internet. They are offered for free to the public and used by millions. Without CC’s open source products, the ecosystem for openly licensed content would suffer considerably.

All of CC’s open source projects are maintained by a small staff on a limited budget and we need your help to keep our projects running.