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2. Creative Commons licenses
Although the GFDL extended open-content licensing principles outside the domain of software, the license remains tied to a specific context, namely, the licensing of software manuals and other texts. Many provisions of the GFDL, such as the references to “title pages,” “cover texts,” “invariant sections,” are difficult to understand or to apply outside the context of literary works. Thus, although the GFDL represented an important step in the evolution of open-content licensing, it failed to yield a product generally applicable to all varieties of copyrightable work.

Extending open-content licensing more broadly to other types of works became the mission of the nonprofit Creative Commons organization. Creative Commons’s co-founder, law professor Lawrence Lessig, explained that the project aimed to create a commons of expressive works freely available for others to copy and reuse by adopting the same types of licensing arrangements that had proved successful in the FOSS world:

The idea (again, stolen from the FSF [Free Software Foundation]) was to produce copyright licenses that artists, authors, educators, and researchers could use to announce to the world the freedoms that they want their creative work to carry. If the default rule of copyright is “all rights reserved,” the express meaning of a Creative Commons license is that only “some rights [are] reserved.” For example, copyright law gives the copyright holder the exclusive right to make “copies” of his or her work. A Creative Commons license could, in effect, announce that this exclusive right was given to the public.

To appreciate the innovative character of the Creative Commons family of licenses, consider how each of the licenses considered so far joins certain policy decisions together in the terms of the license. In the case of the FOSS licenses, policies surrounding attribution, reciprocity, and commercial use converge, while the GFDL raises the possible prohibition on certain forms of derivative works. Each of the licenses considered previously joins policy decisions on several of those issues together in a single license: GPL-licensed works may be copied for noncommercial purposes, but only on reciprocal terms; BSD-licensed works may be copied for commercial purposes, but only if the licensee provides attribution; and so forth.