With the advent of the Internet, we’ve entered an era of untold potential for development, growth and productivity – but one that is increasingly hindered by restrictive copyright laws and incompatible technologies. Starting back in 2001, Creative Commons has worked to make intellectual property and copyright laws better serve the public good – drafting full legal licenses that allow authors and creators to share their work with the public and supporting efforts to port these licenses for countries around the world.

Today, the Creative Commons Global Network includes over 500 researchers, activists, legal, education and policy advocates, and volunteers who serve as CC representatives in over 85 countries. The commons is a rapidly expanding community of more than 1.2 billion works in 34 different languages.

Through a Creative Commons license, creative works join a rapidly-expanding community of:

·       more than 1.1 billion openly-licensed works,
·       from authors writing in 34 different languages,
·       that have been viewed online 136 billion times.

Creative Commons USA is a chapter of the Creative Commons Global Network. We focus on furthering progress toward open culture, open education, open data, and open access to research in the United States. We provide legal expertise around the Creative Commons licenses, support to organizations and institutions that use (or could use) open licensing, and advice for decision-makers on copyright issues and policies that impact our trend toward a more open society.