Creative Commons in the context of Wikipedia

A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of a given work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.

There are several types of Creative Commons licenses. Each license differs by several combinations that condition the terms of distribution. They were initially released on December 16, 2002, by Creative Commons, a U.S. non-profit corporation founded in 2001. There have also been five versions of the suite of licenses, numbered 1.0 through 4.0. Released in November 2013, the 4.0 license suite is the most current. While the Creative Commons license was originally grounded in the American legal system, there are now several Creative Commons jurisdiction ports which accommodate international laws.

LinuxWorld Conference and Expo (renamed to OpenSource World in its final year) was a conference and trade show that focused on open source and Linux solutions in the information technology sector. It ran from 1998 to 2009, in venues around the world.

The show was owned and managed by IDG World Expo, a business unit of International Data Group (IDG). Keynote speakers included Linux creator Linus Torvalds, One Laptop Per Child founder Nicholas Negroponte, and Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig. Another IDG business unit, Network World, operated the LinuxWorld.com web site, which often carried audio, video, and presentation materials from the show, as well as interviews with the show's speakers.

A Creative Commons NonCommercial license (CC NC, CC BY-NC or NC license) is a Creative Commons license which a copyright holder can apply to their media to give public permission for anyone to reuse that media only for noncommercial activities. Creative Commons is an organization which develops a variety of public copyright licenses, and the "noncommercial" licenses are a subset of these. Unlike the CC0, CC BY, and CC BY-SA licenses, the CC BY-NC license is considered non-free.

A challenge with using these licenses is determining what noncommercial use is.

Flickr (/ˈflɪkər/ FLIK-ər) is an image and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was for a time a common way for amateur and professional photographers to host high-resolution photos. Flickr was owned by Yahoo! from 2005 and has been owned by SmugMug since 2018.

As of June 10, 2015, Flickr had a total of 112 million registered members and more than 3.5 million new images uploaded daily. On August 5, 2011, the site reported that it was hosting more than 6 billion images. In 2024, it was reported as having shared 10 billion photos and accepting 25 million per day. Flickr also hosts the largest collection of Creative Commons-licensed photos on the web.

ccMixter is a community music produsage website that promotes remix culture and makes samples, remixes, and a cappella tracks licensed under Creative Commons available for download and re-use in creative works. Visitors are able to listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in a variety of ways, including the download and use of tracks and samples in their own remixes. Most sampling or mash-up websites stipulate that users forgo their rights to the new song once it is created. By contrast, the material on ccMixter.org is generally licensed to be used in any arena, not just the ccMixter site or a specific context. The ccMixter site contains over 10,000 samples from a wide range of recording artists, including high-profile musicians such as Beastie Boys and David Byrne.

As a cultural phenomenon, ccMixter represents a direct response to what some say is the increasingly litigious attitude of organizations like the RIAA—one which prevents artists from appropriating elements of others' work for creative reuse in their own.

Lester Lawrence "Larry" Lessig III (born June 3, 1961) is an American legal scholar and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. He is the founder of Creative Commons and of Equal Citizens. Lessig was a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president of the United States in the 2016 U.S. presidential election but withdrew before the primaries.

Public-domain software is software that has been placed in the public domain, in other words, software for which there is absolutely no ownership such as copyright, trademark, or patent. Software in the public domain can be modified, distributed, or sold even without any attribution by anyone; this is unlike the common case of software under exclusive copyright, where licenses grant limited usage rights.

Under the Berne Convention, which most countries have signed, an author automatically obtains the exclusive copyright to anything they have written, and local law may similarly grant copyright, patent, or trademark rights by default. The Convention also covers programs, and they are therefore automatically subject to copyright. If a program is to be placed in the public domain, the author must explicitly disclaim the copyright and other rights on it in some way, e.g. by a waiver statement. In some jurisdictions, some rights (in particular moral rights) cannot be disclaimed: for instance, civil tradition-based German law's "Urheberrecht" differs from Anglo-Saxon common law tradition's "copyright" concept.

Harold Abelson (born April 26, 1947) is an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor of computer science and engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a founding director of both Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation, creator of the MIT App Inventor platform, and co-author of the widely-used textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP), sometimes also referred to as "the wizard book" because of its cover illustration.

He directed the first implementation of the language Logo for the Apple II, which made the language widely available on personal computers starting in 1981; and published a widely selling book on Logo in 1982. Together with Gerald Jay Sussman, Abelson developed MIT's introductory computer science subject, "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (often referred to by the MIT course number, 6.001), a subject organized around the idea that a computer language is primarily a formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology, rather than just a way to get a computer to perform operations.

Freebase was a large collaborative knowledge base consisting of data composed mainly by its community members. It was an online collection of structured data harvested from many sources, including individual, user-submitted wiki contributions. Freebase aimed to create a global resource that allowed people (and machines) to access common information more effectively. It was developed by the American software company Metaweb and run publicly beginning in March 2007. Metaweb was acquired by Google in a private sale announced on 16 July 2010. Google's Knowledge Graph is powered in part by Freebase.

During its existence, Freebase data was available for commercial and non-commercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution License, and an open API, RDF endpoint, and a database dump is provided for programmers.