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WHAT IS CREATIVE COMMONS? - 5 -

In domains like textbook publishing, academic research, documentary film-making, and many other fields, restrictive copyright rules continue to inhibit the creation, access, and remix of works. CC tools are helping to solve this problem. In 2017, CC licenses were used by more than 1.4 billion works online across 9 million websites (figure 1.2); since 2017, the number of CC-licensed works has increased to over 1.6 billion. The grand experiment that started more than fifteen years ago has been a success, sometimes in ways that were unimagined by CC’s founders. (For more information, see the “State of the Commons” at the Creative Commons website: https://stateof.creativecommons.org.) While other custom open copyright licenses have been developed in the past, we recommend using Creative Commons licenses because they are up-to-date, free to use, and have been broadly adopted by governments, institutions, and individuals as the global standard for open copyright licenses.

In the next section, you’ll learn more about what Creative Commons looks like today—the licenses, the organization, and the movement.

Final Remarks

Technology now makes it possible for online content to be consumed by millions of people at once, and it can be copied, shared, and remixed with speed and