The goal of the Creative Commons project is to allow creators to share their works with others; to build a large pool of creative content that others can use and re-use in their own works, and restore some sanity to the intellectual property debate.

Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control—a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which “all rights reserved” (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy—a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation—once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally—have become endangered species.

Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare “some rights reserved.” Thus, a single goal unites Creative Commons’ current and future projects: to build a layer of reasonable, flexible copyright in the face of increasingly restrictive default rules.

The site that powers Creative Commons is built on Arsdigita’s Community System (ACS). The technology behind the licenses themselves is RDF, enabling our new Semantic Web search engine to seek out specific information on many web sites. We are regarded as one of the few public applications of the Semantic Web and are currently part of Semantic Web working groups at the W3C.

While the project isn’t exactly software, it is free licenses that are split into three layers: a humanreadable version anyone can understand, a lawyer-readable version for legal minds, and a machine- readable version that can be parsed by software applications and used in creative ways. The problem Creative Commons is addressing is the space between All Rights Reserved and No Rights Reserved—we are effectively letting creators license their content as Some Rights Reserved, per their wishes.

The potential users of our licenses are any creators of creative content. This includes musicians posting recordings online, artists sharing their drawings and paintings, photographers that would like others to collage their work, educators that want to share syllabi, and writers that would like to see others create stories based off their own. The potential beneficiaries of Creative Commons licenses include anyone that would like access to music, photos, writing, or films they would like to enjoy or recast into new works.

We feel our project is vital to the creative future of the internet, and of creativity in general. In a world of constantly increasing restrictions on what artists can do with their creations, Creative Commons exists to help creators share their work with others, and contribute to a rich pool of creativity that can be freely and legally built upon.